Wingate Studio is pleased to announce Violet Orbit Motion, a new, richly layered color etching by Brooklyn-based, Nigerian British artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones. This is the artist’s third project with
the studio. The image’s chromatically saturated figures and foliage combine to form an intricate composition that appears to pulsate with repeated, cyclical motion. Four figures appear to dance, their arms and legs lifted and lowered, taut and rounded, enact a gestural ritual that is at once reminiscent of West African traditions and an allusion to the rhythmic figures readily associated with Matisse. More specifically, the elegantly etched pale blue lines that accent these bodies likewise make a dual reference. On the one hand
they recall the scarification found in Benin sculptures; and, on the other, they extend the floral references made in the artist’s recent contribution to the Nigerian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, wherein the composition’s linear elements echo the adjacent architectural flourishes of the historic Venetian palazzo that hosted his colossal ceiling painting.