Boluwatife Oyediran

Biography
Boluwatife Oyediran - Lady with a boll, 2022
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.
Works
Exhibitions
Art Fairs