EXHIBITIONS
Jadé Fadojutimi “Our Inner Tide”
Dates: Dec 20, 2025 – Jan 31, 2026
[Winter Holidays: Dec 27, 2025 – Jan 6, 2026]
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Roppongi & Kyobashi (two-venue exhibitions)
Opening reception: Saturday, Dec 20, 17:00 – 19:00 (Kyobashi)
Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present “Our Inner Tide,” a solo exhibition by Jadé Fadojutimi, held concurrently at its Roppongi and Kyobashi spaces from Saturday, 20th December to Saturday, 31st January. This autumn, Fadojutimi relocated her base of production to Tokyo. Marking her third solo exhibition with Taka Ishii Gallery, the show brings together a new body of large-scale paintings created in Japan—an environment that continues to exert a profound influence on her practice—alongside the first presentation of a new soundscape installation.
A defining characteristic of Fadojutimi’s painting lies in its rich and striking use of color, articulated through dynamic, animated brushwork. Flowing strokes of oil paint are layered repeatedly, allowing color and form to merge in a state of constant motion, while the subsequent wiping away of accumulated paint exposes previously concealed layers beneath the surface. Upon these moist, tactile grounds, swift yet delicate lines drawn with oil pastel and oil bar are applied, infusing the works with further energy and rhythm.
Fadojutimi translates her sensitively fluctuating emotional and affective states into color, entrusting them to the canvas. Her interest is directed toward abstract realms that unsettle a society grounded in linguistic systems, as well as toward territories of identity shaped by memory, emotion, and the continuity of the self over time. Music—particularly soundtracks—serves as a vital medium in this exploration: the melodies that permeate her studio evoke memories of past emotional experiences, creating moments in which these memories overlap with sensations of the present, adding to her questions around identity. As she paints, Fadojutimi allows past and present experiences, along with the questions that arise from them, to enter into dialogue, carefully attending to their subtle oscillations. The completed paintings emerge in resonance with these modes of thought, sensitively capturing innumerable fleeting moments of response as they continually shift—reflecting a fragment of the self.
Amid the waves of thought that move back and forth between past and present, the act of painting itself becomes her point of anchorage—a familiar yet unfamiliar place—through which she temporarily holds her inner world on the canvas and opens it to the viewer. The titles of her works, which accompany and at times question our everyday experiences through which the self is formed, further guide each work toward becoming a place of belonging for the viewer.
At the Kyobashi gallery, “The Texture of Reality Has Begun to Shift,” an installation consisting of three soundscape works—Fadojutimi’s first undertaking in this medium—will be presented for the first time. Experimental in nature, these works replace the paintbrush with the artist’s own voice and that of sound designer and audio producer Taylor Hilton, yet their structure resonates strikingly with her painting practice. Rather than layering color, differing vocal tones, breaths, and resonances accumulate over time, while form is drawn through melody. Harmonies that unfold like sequences of pleasing colors speak directly to our mental landscapes, while high and low tones—corresponding to the swift, forceful lines of oil pastel and oil bar—punctuate moments of tension and release. These soundscape works may thus be understood as frequencies of color in the absence of painting. Within the intersecting realms of sight and sound, she reconstructs the essence of “painting,” revealing the vibrations of her inner world in a more multilayered form. As we “see” fluctuations of color within the soundscape works, we in turn “hear” in the paintings a soundtrack that touches upon the continuity of our own memories and emotions, posing the question as to whether paintings can be seen as soundtracks to our lives
Jadé Fadojutimi was born in London in 1993 and currently lives and works between Tokyo and London. She studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London before completing her MA at the Royal College of Art, London. Recent solo exhibitions include The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield (2022); ICA Miami (2021) and PEER, London (2019). Selected group exhibitions include “In Our Time: Selections from the Singer Collection,” Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2022) and “Mixing It Up: Painting Today,” Hayward Gallery, London (2021). She has participated in major international exhibitions such as the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and the Liverpool Biennial (2021). Her works are held in the collections of institutions including the Albertina, Vienna; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Hepworth Wakefield; ICA Miami; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
