Art Forum | Critics' Picks: Alimi Adewale

Ayodeji Rotinwa, August 17, 2023
Alimi Adewale is an artist constantly experimenting with style. For his series “Migration,” 2016–20, he crowded his canvases with seemingly animated forms that bleed into one another. He worked in an impasto style, applying a warm and bright palette of azure, pink, blue, and yellow against pale-gray color fields. In contrast, in more recent paintings like Gaze into the Future, 2021, the figure (usually feminine and depicted at life size) is solitary, brooding if not altogether expressionless. Unlike in the “Migration” series, there is a firm order here, with the subjects placed against a background of floating geometric shapes.