Immanuel Adelowo

Immanuel Adelowo is a resident artist at ActionSpace’s Studio Voltaire studio. Adelowo makes precise paintings and drawings that depict highly specific but imagined places. These works involve the use of memory, digital images, and observations from the real world in one place. His marks come from his feeling for the materials he uses, and a careful design of the composition. In all his pieces colour-blending becomes a way of showing us the relationships between things and how they fit together.

About his thought process while painting, Adelowo says: “It’s about trying for balance… between what is there and not there – questions of what to keep and not keep. If I do a brush mark, and it looks good there, I leave it and search for when a piece of the painting ‘fits’.”

The artist often paints open spaces that contain intricate domestic details. This produces intriguing, surreal contrasts, like a small table sat in a vast mountainous landscape, or a tray of drinks offered up in a desert. The movement of the sea, caves and the horizon are repeated motifs. His work invites us to think about what is seen and what is remembered, creating a world where an atmosphere of strangeness houses everyday objects.