Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (b. 1992, London, United Kingdom) is an artist living and working in New York.

Adeniyi-Jones’s paintings emerge from a perspective of what the artist describes as ‘cultural addition, combination and collaboration’. Born and educated in the UK and now living and working in the USA, his practice is inspired by the ancient history of West Africa and its attendant mythology, and by his Yoruba heritage.

Often beginning with studies in ink pen or watercolour on paper as a means to explore his imagery, Adeniyi-Jones employs a varied palette and works with different seasons or times of day. His characters and forms are repeated and re-worked in multi-panel paintings which depict figures in small groups or pairs, invoking the ritualized repetition integral to ceremonial processes.

His boldly coloured paintings are set within a flat, shallow space located in modernist abstraction – in particular the overlapping planes of Cubism and the colourful papier découpé of Matisse – as well as the narratives and symbolism of West Africa. In these, abstract backgrounds of lush, stylized foliage proliferate across the canvas surface, the sinewy bodies emerging and dissolving into the tessellating shapes and interlocking swathes of colour.

Addressing the perception of the black body within Western painting – and in particular, its association with physicality – Adeniyi-Jones uses the body as both narrative instrument and primary tool of communication. Emphasising the importance of dance and body language in a continent where over 1000 languages co-exist, his works site the figure at the fulcrum of contemporary diasporic identity, one formed, as the artist notes, by “travel, movement and cultural hybridity”.

Adeniyi-Jones’ locates his paintings within a specifically Nigerian cultural landscape; one that includes the post-Colonial writing and painting: “Every memorable Greek myth or fable that we know of has an equally compelling African counterpart, but because of reductive concepts like primitivism, one rarely sees the expansive world of ancient West Africa represented outside of the continent. These cultural parallels have been detailed most notably through the literature of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Amos Tutuola, and I want my paintings to serve as a visual accompaniment to this lineage,” he has stated.

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