Painting
Paintings often use distortion, texture, and charged colour relationships to question how skin, body, and selfhood are culturally read.
About
Soji Adesina
Soji Adesina (b. 1981) is a Nigerian-British multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, film, and photography. Through deliberate experimentation with material and form, he has built a distinct visual language that challenges stable ideas of representation.
His figures often carry distortion, body dysmorphia, exaggeration, and emotional ambiguity. Through them he explores identity, memory, language, globalization, conflict, sovereignty, and the contemporary African experience.
Born in Lagos, 1981
H.N.D Painting, Yaba College of Technology
Works held in private and corporate collections
Practice
A studio language shaped by experiment and contradiction.
Film
Film extends the narrative impulse in the work, allowing motion, sequencing, and atmosphere to deepen the same concerns around identity and social pressure.
Photography
Photography sharpens attention to framing, stillness, observation, and the tension between documentary surface and inner life.
Core themes
Questions that recur across the work
- Identity and skin: abstract colour and mark-making as a way to unsettle fixed readings of race and belonging.
- Memory and observation: the figure as a carrier of private recollection and shared historical residue.
- Globalization and migration: how power, movement, and international dynamics shape selfhood.
- Language and metaphor: irony, paradox, and symbolism used as visual thinking tools.
- Conflict and sovereignty: the psychological afterlife of state power, displacement, and instability.
CV note
Selected education and profile
- Education: H.N.D Painting, School of Art, Design and Printing, Yaba College of Technology, Lagos, 2010.
- Collections: Work held in private and corporate collections in Nigeria and abroad.
- Cities: Exhibitions and fairs have included Lagos, New York, Paris, London, Sao Paulo, and Dakar.
- Current focus: a refined monochrome body of work exploring scarification, line, and ancestral continuity.
Timeline
CV highlights
2010
Yaba College of Technology
Completed H.N.D Painting, School of Art, Design and Printing, Lagos.
2015
Crossing Lines: Interactions
Group exhibition at Rele Gallery, Lagos.
2018
Dak'Art and DRAWN Volume 2
Participated in Gallery of Small Things at the 13th edition of Dak'Art, Dakar, and featured in DRAWN volume 2, leaders in Contemporary Illustration.
2021-2022
Making Faces and other Lagos group shows
Presented work through Rele Gallery, AMG Projects, and O'DA Gallery.
2023
International art fairs
AKAA Paris, 1:54 London, and SP-Arte Brazil, alongside continued visibility through Lagos fairs.
2024-2025
Collection and solo exhibition milestone
Included in the Shyllon Museum context through Collecting Art, followed by the debut solo exhibition Marks of Our Future Past and additional group presentations in Lagos and New York.
Further Reading