Poetic Feet

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Downing Street

Poetic Feet features two dancers set against backgrounds of vivid curling flame-like patterns. As the artist states this body of work is about, ‘how the transformative nature of the Black experience is nourished by travel, movement and cultural hybridity’. Informed by his own Yoruba heritage, in his paintings Adeniyi-Jones fuses West African mythology and iconography with the Western art canon.

Adeniyi-Jones’s patterning recalls Lorenzo Monaco’s Renaissance illuminated manuscript Last Judgement (1406–07) and the iconography of limbs reference Renaissance masterpieces where hands and feet are symbols for anguish and ecstasy. Androgynous in appearance, the figures are an amalgamation of styles that includes the visual traditions of West African sculpture, specifically Benin and Ife bronze heads which are sometimes adorned with flowing lines, resembling those found in the practice of facial scarification. Belonging to a new series of works each of which a subtle variation of the other, in Poetic Feet, Adeniyi-Jones’s figures and forms are doubled, invoking the repetition of ritualised acts that are integral to ceremonial processes. The doubling also speaks to the artist’s personal recollections of his childhood; being an only child he used to conjure up fictional siblings.

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones was born in London in 1992 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 2014 he received his Bachelors in Fine Arts from The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, UK and in 2017 he was awarded an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art, Connecticut, USA. Exhibitions include: That Which Binds Us, White Cube, Bermondsey, London (2021), and Morán Morán, Los Angeles (2021). Recent solo exhibitions include 39 Great Jones Street, New York (2020); Patterns and Rituals, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2020); Dreams Through Seasons: New Paintings, The Cabin, Los Angeles (2018); and Flash of the Spirit, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2017).

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil paint, oil painting

Artist

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones (1992 - )

Title

Poetic Feet

Date

2021

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 206.0 cm; width: 145.2 cm; depth: 6.0 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from White Cube, March 2022

Provenance

White Cube; from whom purchased by UK Government Art Collection, 31 March 2022

GAC number

19098