Colorful and wild: Jadé Fadojutimi inspires the art world

Jadé Fadojutimi stands in front of one of her paintings and almost disappears into it. Her colorful dress blends in with the wild colors and lines on the canvas. The large-format paintings evoke the feeling of diving into an unknown world. Fadojutimi's richly colored canvases capture her emotions and personal experiences, both positive and negative. She reveals her innermost self. Fadojutimi's works read like a diary in which she processes the external influences that shape and affect her identity.

After completing her bachelor's degree, Fadojutimi, a British artist, traveled to Japan for the first time in 2016. Born in 1993, she has long been fascinated by anime and the country's aesthetic: » I feel like every country has its own aesthetic. Every country has its own smell. Every country has its own rhythm as well. Because I was drawn to another country's rhythm, I wanted to understand why it harmonised with my rhythm«, she tells Ocula Magazine in 2021. Instead of the harmony she had hoped for, she felt disorientation, very surprising for herself. Since then, she has returned to Japan every year to investigate reasons for this difficult period, when she felt she did not know herself, and her continuing fascination.

Japanese artists such as Yoshitomo Nara and Makiko Kudo influence Fadojutimi's artwork. Likewise, the many sketches she makes of Japanese nature and cities serve as her foundation. Fadojutimi paints the canvases, which often measure about four to six square meters, mostly at night and with careful, deliberate intuition. She also teaches art, an activity that helps enrich her artwork. Discussions with her students change her perspective on her own works-in-progress and foster a complexity that pure intuition cannot achieve.

Fadojutimi straddles the line between abstraction and figuration, painting gesturally and in bright colors − when it suits her current mood. The full range of her emotions finds its way into her paintings. »We are all colours that are constantly fluctuating, we change every day, we change every minute, and it was a wonderful thing to think about in terms of why these paintings feel so different to me all the time, because I am constantly changing, and the colours I am experiencing are constantly changing«, she explains in an interview with Artsy.

In the few years since she graduated with her master's degree in 2017, Fadojutimi has gone from a graduate to one of the art world's most sought-after newcomers. As a student at the Royal College of Art, London, she won the Hine Painting Prize. The young painter quickly came to the attention of the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, which has represented Fadojutimi ever since, and organized her first exhibition in 2017/18. At the latest since the Tate Gallery acquired an oil painting by the then 26-year-old in 2019, Fadojutimi's name has been known on the art market: She is the youngest artist to be represented in the Tate Gallery's collection. »To be thrown in the spotlight and to have all these opportunities, it felt like an opportunity for me to share myself. I am really hard on myself when it comes to painting. I want so much from it. And I think I sometimes evolve faster than I realise«, she comments on her rapid rise.

In the last two years, her works quickly crossed the million-dollar mark. In April 2022, Fadojutimi's first solo show in the U.S. − at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami − ended, and she is a participant in this year's Venice Biennale: more milestones in the career of an artist she has achieved at such a young age.

Fadojutimi is considered one of the most inventive abstract artists working today. New to her palette are acrylic paints and oil pastels, which make her works appear more graphic. She also developed an interest in installations, which she hopes to explore further in the future.