INI OLUWA
Nigerian visual artist exploring solitude, memory, identity, and dreams of home.
Statement
I paint solitude and dreams of home.
My visual explorations of these ideas are rooted in years spent alone in the studio, working through what I remember, what I've lost, and what I'm still building. Painting, for me, is an act of rumination, reminiscence, and imagination.
Through recurring motifs of fabric, individuation, and abstract landscapes, I create spaces that honor the viewer's sense of self and their own reveries of home.
I work primarily in acrylic on canvas, alongside drawings made with ink, acrylic, white charcoal, and pastel. Sometimes these works incorporate text, extending the same themes into language and a more intimate scale.
Biography
Ini Oluwa (b. 1994), born Inioluwa Aboluwarin, is a Nigerian visual artist. A self-taught painter, he left a career in technology in 2016 to pursue painting full-time.
His practice is centered on solitude, memory, identity, and dreams of home, working primarily in acrylic on canvas alongside a body of ink drawings. Through recurring motifs of fabric, individuation, and abstract landscapes, he gives these themes emotional architecture.
He has exhibited locally and internationally, including in Breathing While Black at Augusta Savage Gallery, Amherst, with further exhibitions in Lagos and London. His work is held in private collections across more than twenty countries. In 2023, he presented his debut solo exhibition, Fountainhead, a multi-sensory exhibition in Lagos featuring one hundred paintings.
Alongside his studio practice, he created The Atlas Project, an ongoing collaborative portrait and storytelling archive built around a single question posed to every participant: What is the most difficult challenge you've ever faced, and how did you overcome it? Developed in partnership with each collaborator, the project has grown to include more than 130 portraits of people from around the world, including public figures, advocates, artists, and everyday individuals.
Ini Oluwa lives and works from his private studio in Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
