EXHIBITIONS

Jadé Fadojutimi “Memory in Translation”

Dates: Dec 3, 2022 – Jan 14, 2023
[Winter Holidays: Dec 28, 2022 – Jan 5, 2023]
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery (complex665)
Opening reception: Saturday, Dec 3, 18:00 – 20:00

The gallery will implement necessary measures to prevent coronavirus infections.

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Jadé Fadojutimi, “Memory in Translation” from Saturday, Dec 3, 2022 until Saturday, Jan 14, 2023. This is Fadojutimi’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, as well as her first in Asia, and will feature entirely new paintings. The paintings will range in size and make full use of her vibrant, expressive use of color.

Postponed last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fadojutimi’s solo show at Taka Ishii Gallery marks a long-awaited return of the artist and her work to Japan. Markedly influenced by Japanese animation, video games, clothing, and soundtracks during her childhood, these memories and interests continue to play a pivotal role in Fadojutimi’s practice. It was in Kyoto, during a 2016 residency, that she states her career truly began. Until the pandemic, Fadojutimi would sometimes make several trips a year to Japan for her practice, and this will also mark her first chance to visit since Japan’s borders closed. Despite the prolonged distance, the country’s landscapes still appear within her recent work, as she imagined what it would be like to return.

Her paintings and drawings are directly born out of her life and surroundings. The color palettes may be determined by a piece of clothing she cannot stop wearing or a color she sees when she feels an emotion. Neon hues, bright and bold yellows, reds, and blues, muted greens, soft lavender, strident fuchsia, the entire visual spectrum of color is made use of. Through her unique understanding of color, the production and end result appear to hold their own rhythm and private messages, which are translated into titles, evocative and usually a key to understanding the work from Fadojutimi’s perspective. In the last two years she added oil pastels to her repertoire, which opened a new relationship to color for Fadojutimi, a method of speaking within her artistic language, and a chance to play and experiment with the medium. Metaphorically and physically, this also produced a new source of movement on the canvas and within the thought process that takes place while she paints. In her distinctive realm between abstract and figurative, the lines glide across and around the canvas, moving according to Fadojutimi’s orchestrations. Self-described as a sweating out of love, a giving over to the pleasure of the act of painting itself, she engages all her senses to both produce work and subsequently react to it. Her work is a way to (re)create the world by immaterial means of imagination and the senses, through the physical means of painting and drawing.

【Concurrent Exhibition】
Jadé Fadojutimi “This land escapes me and continues to grow”
Dates: December 23, 2022 – January 28, 2023
Location: SKWAT/twelvebooks
5-3-2 Minami-aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo

Jadé Fadojutimi was born in London, UK in 1993 and continues to live and work there. She studied painting at Slade School of Fine Art, London and received an MA degree at Royal College of Art, London. Fadojutimi’s exhibitions include the Hepworth Wakefield (2022); WHAT Museum, Tokyo (2022); ICA Miami (2021) and Columbus Museum of Art (2021). She participated in the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, 2022 and the Liverpool Biennial in 2021, UK. In 2023, she has an upcoming residency at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France. Fadojutimi’s works belong to public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art; the Hepworth Wakefield; ICA Miami; Tate, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others.

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