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Alimi Adewale is an artist continuously experimenting with fashion. For his sequence “Migration,” 2016–20, he crowded his canvases with seemingly animated types that bleed into each other. He labored in an impasto fashion, making use of a heat and vivid palette of azure, pink, blue, and yellow in opposition to pale-gray colour fields. In distinction, in more moderen work like Gaze into the Future, 2021, the determine (often female and depicted at life dimension) is solitary, brooding if not altogether expressionless. Not like within the “Migration” sequence, there’s a agency order right here, with the themes positioned in opposition to a background of floating geometric shapes.
Adewale attracts from each these approaches in his newest exhibition, “Everlasting Kinds: Exploring the Intersection of Earth and Humanity.” Though not broadly recognized, petroglyphs abound in Nigeria, significantly within the areas of the as soon as feared Ife Empire. Drawing on this pictorial language, the artist juxtaposes the traditional—cave drawings of adolescence—with extra modern portraits. For the sequence “Timeless Tales”, 2022–23, Adewale has deserted impasto to scrawl photos of goats, vegetation, males searching, and a ship (or ark?) in thinly utilized pigments on stitched heavy cotton. He additionally contains what look like numbering programs, all rendered in earth tones of brown, crimson, bronze, and olive. In the meantime, the colourful portraits of “Ethereal Gaze”, 2022–23, break with market-friendly clichés of Black figuration. Adewale’s topics could have vague expressions, however he embeds them inside a cascade of riotous patterns. In one other sequence, “Magnificence Inside”, 2023, the artist returns to orderly figuration, however this time with the physique affixed in embroidery.
All instructed, Adewale, in the end, is extra approach than narrative. On this present greater than ever earlier than, he’s an artist at play and on the peak of his powers, given to visually satisfying experiments on wooden, stitched cotton, and canvas.
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