From his early shows at the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London and Gisela Capitain in Berlin, presented shortly after graduating from the Royal Academy, Jadé Fadojutimi’s rise to prominence has been meteoric. In a few short years, his abstract paintings—designed by a 31-year-old British artist of Nigerian heritage—have entered the world’s largest collection, with auction prices soaring into the seven-digit range. His record, recorded last March at Christie’s London, was spotted The Woven Garden of Meditation (2021) fetched £1.6 million ($2 million), three times previous results and confirming his place as one of the brightest lights in today’s art world.
Leaving his first dealers, Fadojutimi moved to Gagosian in 2022, starting with a full-time gallery space at Frieze London. Yet despite his dominance of the market, his work retains its raw, poignant power—an exploration of deeply personal yet universally affecting experiences. His paintings are a complex series of marks, touches and flowing waves of paint, born out of an intense emotional and physical connection with the canvas. Fadojutimi paints with a visceral urgency, moving spontaneously across the surface as if surrendering to his sense of gravity.
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Evoking landscapes and maps of spaces unbound by conventional boundaries or timelines, his compositions are an open invitation to wander. Layered systems of marks lead the viewer in dramatic, free movement to any single focal point or symbolic anchor. His work becomes an endless collection of traces—existential annotations mixed with a spiritual, almost ritualistic touch. As Fadojutimi paints, he aligns with the flow of energy around the world, creating vast spaces that oscillate between confusion and redirection, transcending linguistic, cultural and individual boundaries to reach a cosmic space of connection.
His first exhibition at the Gagosian in New York, “DWELVE: A Goosebump in Memory,” reflects this dynamic with more powerful and complex works. These new pieces layer tactile symbols into dense, complex spaces that seem to exist simultaneously on all spatial and temporal scales. Fadojutimi probes and dwells within the canvas, its movement capturing the endless layering and rewriting of memory and experience. This existing layout extends to a series of drawings on paper and his lively diary, documenting his daily thoughts as an extension of his body and mind.
The juxtaposition of different color gradients and tones in Fadojutimi’s work creates a physical tension between layers and traces, which harmonize by alternating or clashing. These fluctuations reflect the conflicting thoughts, inputs and emotions our brains grapple with as they process the overlapping events of our inner and outer worlds. Some sails penetrate the voices of the night or the sea, evoking the depths of the unconscious or the heavenly plane, while others radiate warmth and air, directing the sunlight to the earth. This ebb and flow of fluidity—from otherworldly dimensions to earthly support—may explain the bumps his work evokes, the visceral response to its powerful resonance.
Fadojutimi’s orchestrations of marks and chromatic sensibilities create a rich palimpsest of how memory and the mind really work. His abstracts vividly capture our physical, temporal, psychological and energetic experience of our reality, putting it into works that feel alive. As “DWELVE: A Goosebump in Memory,” approaches its final weeks, we sat down with the artist to discuss how this latest work reflects his continued exploration of identity, emotion and experience through the language of abstraction.
There may be different ways of not reaching: one that is spiritual and with songs that tend to relieve the same emotions as poetry or musical composition, the other expresses clearly and physically, based on movement and understanding in the transfer of intention to movement. Which one do you feel best describes the way you work?
This is the first time I’ve heard those two methods described as separate languages. I hope my paintings can shift between these mediums and blur the boundaries, like a kind of abstract Impressionism. My work still stands between the definitions you gave, and I hope it highlights some unique qualities of my painting language.
The show’s title, “Goosebump in Memory,” seems to suggest a connection between those paintings and the process of memory. Does it reflect that connection, and how do you use color, space and line to explore your identity through emotions and experiences?
My practicewas eager to express and translate a temporary way of questioning identity through efforts to blur and combine life experiences into a permanent and visual conversation through the language of painting. With this exhibition, I wanted to capture the essence of my notebooks and how they look like a visual diary that I interpret as a daily curiosity and acceptance of daily emotional and natural changes that I hope to reflect on and be present in again. The paintings capture those events worthy of “goosebumps” that I want to stay forever with the viewer and explore deeply through conversation and constructive expression through color, shape and form.
While recombining certain areas of inner poetry, your compositions always retain a certain mysterious melody created by the seemingly chaotic accumulation of marks that finally find their harmonious balance in the final composition. Can you walk us through the process of those activities?
Every painting starts in a different way, as I have an open and varied approach to painting. My painting language has blossomed from experimenting with liquids, a medium that is the main ingredient of work other than paint. I might start from a drawing and transfer its essence to the canvas as a starting point, and then, as I begin to respond to the drawing as a separate work, other drawings bleed into the work as notes. Some paintings don’t start with a drawing. It might start with a composition, a color palette or a reference to something I saw recently that caught my attention.
Your work continues with a powerful but spontaneous and endlessly powerful accumulation of gestures and brushes. How do you decide when a painting is finished?
I feel that the painting is finished when I spend more time with my work as a spectator instead of an artist. There are times when you can’t help but spend time and work instead of painting. It steals your attention. That’s when I decide something is missing, and if it’s not, I leave the job. I feel that there are qualities that I look for in each work that help me to understand when the work is finished by asking myself what I want from the work, but more than that, I believe that there is always a point where the artist has to give up his role. at work.
