Boluwatife Oyediran

Biography
Boluwatife Oyediran - Higher goals (After Hammons), 2024
Boluwatife Oyediran - Higher goals (After Hammons), 2024
BOLUWATIFE OYEDIRAN WAS BORN IN NIGERIA IN 1997. HE CURRENTLY LIVES AND WORKS IN RHODE ISLAND, USA.

After a period at the Noldor Residency in Accra in 2021-2022, Ghana, Boluwatife Oyediran pursued his artistic career at the Rhode Island School of Design, from which he recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting. 
 
A contemporary figurative painter, Oyedrian’s practice reflects his deep commitment to exploring Black identity, which he reimagines and reorients within the canons of history, religion and Western art. 
 
Oyediran's early works used cotton as a central symbol of his thinking. They encouraged reflection on historical systemic oppression, by questioning the links between the history of fashion, the history of cotton and the way in which these histories are linked to Black labour. 
 
His ongoing conceptual research – which is a continuation of his previous body of work –  led him to develop the concept of 'Inverted Blackness'. In these new portraits Black figures are painted in negative; their bodies are blue and luminous, as though going through a transformative and otherworldly experience. The people who populate his new paintings are immigrants and nonimmigrants who left the African continent to settle in the United States. This new series will be the subject of a second solo exhibition at the AFIKARIS gallery in autumn 2024, entitled Inverted Blackness and accompanied by a publication of the same name. 
 
Boluwatife Oyediran has had two solo gallery exhibitions: Point of Correction at AFIKARIS Gallery in Paris in January 2022 and For Boiz Like Me Who've Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf at 1957 Gallery in Accra in the summer of 2022. His work has also been shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Krems, Austria, as part of the exhibition The New African Portraiture. Shariat Collections curated by Ekow Eshun.
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Interview

On the occasion of his solo show Inverted Blackness, on view at our gallery until 23 November 2024, artist Boluwatife Oyediran shared with us the story behind his project and his creative vision in a a special interview.


HOW DID YOUR ARTISTIC JOURNEY BEGIN, AND WHEN DID YOU REALIZE YOU WANTED TO BECOME AN ARTIST?

 

I think I’ve been an artist for most of my life, since when I was a child. Everybody has that story of them making stick drawings while they were very young, before they got better at drawing, and then moved on to something else. But, professionally, I became an artist during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was then I could say that I discovered what it is that artists do. And since then, I’ve been on a journey to finding my style and voice as a visual artist. 

 

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR ARTISTIC STYLE AND HOW HAS YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS EVOLVED?

 

Currently, I make figurative paintings, mostly. But I write short stories on the side; I dabble in fiction. During my MFA program at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design] I tried to incorporate some of my short fictions into my paintings, which led to works like The Transfiguration (2023-24) which is part of my latest exhibition Inverted Blackness.

 

My creative process has evolved over these last few years partly because I’m still discovering myself as an artist. I think I have the potential to do more than I’m doing, and the more I discover myself, the more I evolve. For instance, in my next series I have plans to make some landscape paintings, in connection to my experience as an African immigrant living in America. So, I’ve been studying a lot of Monet and Van Gogh. I don’t believe there’s one medium to say something, so at times I’m looking for another medium to say what I’m saying in my paintings or writings. As Lynette Yiadom-Boakye famously said: “I write the things I cannot paint and paint the things I cannot write.”


READ THE FULL INTERVIEW