Tunji Adeniyi-Jones

In Pattern Makers, sinuous figures move across a flattened, richly patterned ground — their bodies kinetic, their forms interlocking with the geometric rhythms of the composition itself. Warm burnt siennas and deep blacks interweave with bold graphic intervals, creating a surface that vibrates with controlled energy. The work draws the eye inward through layered repetition, as though the act of pattern-making is both the subject and the method.

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones — born in London in 1992 to Nigerian parents, trained at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, and the Yale School of Art — is one of the most significant figurative voices to emerge in contemporary art over the past decade. His practice situates itself within a lineage that runs from the Harlem Renaissance to Nigerian modernism, particularly influenced by Ben Enwonwu, widely regarded as the pioneer of African modernism. At the same time, his flattened picture plane and chromatic boldness carry the structural clarity of Matisse.

Pattern Makers is a deliberate compression of Adeniyi-Jones’s painterly vocabulary into the exacting register of the print medium. His work enters this medium without concession: the bodies retain their ancestral charge, the patterned grounds preserve the density of his larger canvases.

The artist’s ascendant market position reinforces the edition's rarity — his oil painting Love Ritual set a new auction record at Phillips London in 2021, and his work is held in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the ICA Miami, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Acquire Tunji Adeniyi-Jones at a pivotal moment in his international career.