“Crib Notes” is a quick-read dossier focused on the artists who ranked on our best-sellers list for ultra-contemporary art in our 2024 Mid-Year Intelligence Report.
As an alumna of two of London’s most prestigious schools—the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art—Jadé Fadojutimi is one of Britain’s most exciting rising stars.
The young artist creates large-scale abstract paintings, often with hints of figuration, which open themselves up to interpretation without dictating meaning. In her 2021 book “Jesture”, the artist describes “aiming for deep emotion, not deep description”.
Fadojutimi went to the Slade without taking a foundation year and without extensive access to fine art at home. In an interview with Studio International she mentioned feeling “insecure about what I saw as a lack of knowledge about art, art history and contemporary artists compared with other students on the course. At first, this made me feel extremely vulnerable”.
However, the sheer breadth of her influences, which include fashion, nature, music, gaming, Japanese anime, her Nigerian heritage, and her experiences with a form of emotional synesthesia, transformed this worry: “It turned out to be a gift because I realised that art comes from life, which is something I celebrate in my painting now.”
Her studio space is at the core of her practice: a highly curated space filled with objects that allow the artist to indulge in the introspection needed to create her highly expressive paintings. Her recent move into a larger space has allowed her to work on canvas sizes she has always dreamed of. She told The Guardian “the only thing I wanted to do was big paintings”.
She compares her studio to a bedroom, which she has meticulously curated to act as a familiar space conducive to the freedom needed to facilitate her instinctive creative bursts. She is known to work through the night if the mood takes her, and has a very physical approach to painting process. She refers to this deeply emotional, sometimes frenzied, but always instinct-led approach as like “witchcraft”.
Fadojutimi’s £1,552,500 ($1,986,310) sale of The Woven Warped Garden of Ponder (2021) at Christie’s London on 7 May saw her place sixth on our Mid-Year Intelligence Report’s ranking of best-selling ultra-contemporary artists (those born after 1974). This was far from the only major success at auction for Fadojutimi in the first half of this year: she sold 12 out of the 14 lots brought to auction. This 86% sell-through rate and total of $6,122,050 in sales put Fadojutimi in third place in Artnet’s “Most Bankable” ultra-contemporary list, a first time ranking for the artist.
Jadé Fadojutimi, The Luxury of Single Cell Organisms (2019). Courtesy: Christie’s.
Key details: Born in London in 1993. Based in London.
Galleries representing: Gagosian, New York; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Berlin; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo. Fadojutimi’s first solo exhibition with Gagosian was as the gallery’s booth for Frieze London 2022. This year, from November 7 to December 21, Gagosian will be hosting another solo show of Fadojutimi’s, this time at their New York gallery on West 21st Street.
“DWELVE: A Goosebump in Memory” will be the artist’s debut solo exhibition in New York. When asked about her representation with the mega-gallery, Fadojutimi told The Guardian: “I wanted to be with a gallery that I felt represented my potential, and I also wanted to inspire younger people and not let them feel afraid to be with such a big gallery because why not reach for that higher thing? Especially as a Black woman.”
Breakout Moment: In 2020 Fadojutimi became the youngest-ever artist to have work collected by Tate, when she was aged just 27. I Present Your Royal Highness (2018) is a large (6.6 ft x 5.3 ft) canvas dominated by pinks and muted reds and marks the artist’s pivot to more figurative work.
Speaking to Tate’s curator Sofia Karamani in 2019, she said “although these figures might not have been visible to others, they were becoming recognisable and familiar to me and this bothered me. Whilst fighting against this development, I began to realise I could not reject the natural progression my paintings were taking. I decided to embrace these characters and give them centre stage”
Jadé Fadojutimi, The Woven Warped Garden of Ponder (2021). Courtesy: Christie’s.
Auction record: Earning her spots in Artnet’s Mid-Year rankings, the £1,552,500 ($1,986,310) sale of The Woven Warped Garden of Ponder (2021) at Christie’s London 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale was only $50k higher than her previous record set by Quirk my mannerism (2021) which sold at Phillips New York’s 20th Century & Contemporary Art sale in November 2023 for $1,935,500.
Key Quote: “I think about how privileged I am as an artist to be able to come to the studio and feel like I can breathe. I hope other people can look at my work and feel like they can breathe for a moment too.” Interview with Alex Needham for The Guardian, September 2022.