Biography
Adeniyi Damilola is a self-taught Nigerian painter whose work moves in the space between memory and emotion. Born in 1989, he began sketching as a child, inspired by his brother's drawings, and committed fully to art in 2016. Working in oils, acrylic and sand texture on canvas, he composes soft silhouettes and heavily worked surfaces that he describes as holding "stories that words cannot carry" — images built to evoke longing and remembrance rather than to depict a specific scene. The tactile, eroded quality of his canvases, where figures seem to surface and dissolve, has made his work a distinctive presence in the new wave of contemporary African painting, including at AKKA Project's 2025 Venice exhibition.
