Tunji Adeniyi-Jones

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones is a painter whose work is heavily steeped in West African aesthetics; his imagery is a dedication and an homage – a preservation of his Yoruban heritage that also questions idolatry from a distinctly diasporic perspective. He is further invested in presenting this history and personal reflection through an idiosyncratic and contemporized context as his stylized figures and flora adornments float in suspension through preternatural or ritualistic environments, replete with repeating patterns rendered in vibrant tones. Adeniyi-Jones’ androgynous lovers, masked deities, and regal animals dance across his foliated and seasonal spaces, singing to ceremony and mythology with reverie for the natural world.

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (b. 1992, London, England) lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BFA from The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford in 2014, and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2017. He had solo exhibitions at White Cube, London, UK; Charleston, East Sussex, UK; Nicelle Beauchene, New York, NY; and The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA. His work is included in the traveling exhibition Young, Gifted, and Black: The Lumpkin-Bocuzzi Family Collection (2020-2022), and was included in recent group exhibitions at CFHILL, and Loyal Gallery, in Stockholm, Sweden; and at Deitch Projects, Los Angeles, CA. He was an inaugural recipient of the Black Rock Residency, in Dakar, Senegal (2020), and was a La Brea Studio Resident at The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA (2018). Adeniyi-Jones is in the public collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL.