About

Bio

Suraj Adekola (b. 1983, Lagos, Nigeria) is a Manchester-based contemporary artist working between painting, textile, and immersive installation. His practice is rooted in Abeokuta, Ogun State — the birthplace of adire cloth and home of the Egba Yoruba resist-dye tradition — and shaped by the distance between that origin and his current life in Manchester, a city built on the same colonial textile trade that extracted value from the traditions he carries.

 

Adekola works with fragments of adire (tie-dye) sourced directly from Abeokuta alongside textiles coffee-dyed and artificially aged by hand in his Manchester studio. The coffee is not a neutral material — its scent carries his late mother and the cold of a new country simultaneously. Through layering, erosion, repetition, and rupture, his surfaces behave less as paintings and more as carriers of time — holding labour, migration, inheritance, and spiritual residue within a single cloth.

 

His ongoing series Ìṣura / Treasure examines fabric as economic and spiritual currency, asking what transforms anything into treasure and how value is assigned to bodies, traditions, and cultural forms — particularly within the relationship between Africa and global systems of worth. The work lives in the liminal space between textile and painting, feeling closer to music and poetry than image. It evokes the immediate, pre-analytical resonance of a Miles Davis recording or a Lao Tzu verse, where the meaning and the experience are simultaneous.

 

Adekola has exhibited in London, Manchester, Geneva, Beirut, and Nigeria, and has participated in auctions including Bonhams, Piasa, and Genève Enchères. He holds an MA in Contemporary Fine Arts from the University of Salford, Manchester (2021) and a Higher National Diploma in Painting from Auchi Polytechnic, Nigeria (2007).

 

Guided by the mantra, “Art as light, cloth as memory,” his evolving practice continues building a visual language shaped by ritual, transformation, and lived experience — one that seeks not to illustrate history, but to remain in conversation with it.

CV

EDUCATION

2021 – 2022, MA Contemporary Fine Arts, University of Salford, Manchester, UK.

 

2005 - 2007, Higher National Diploma (HND) Painting.

2002 - 2004, Ordinary National Diploma (OND) Painting and General Arts.

School of Art and Design, Auchi Polytechnic, Auchi,

Edo State, Nigeria.

 

 

SOLO EXHIBITION

 

  • 2021 Infinite Growth: Alexis Galleries, Lagos, Nigeria.

  • 2024 Beyond The Box: Izwi Art, Somerset House, London, UK.

 

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

 

  • 2025 Manchester Contemporary Art Fair, UK.

  • 2023 How Beautiful We Were (Are): Kanbi Contemporary Projects, Artsy.

  • 2023 Black Beauty, Pride, and Excellence: A Tale of Reappropriation, London Business School, UK.

  • 2022 Proudly Naija Souk, Group Show, London.

  • 2022 Degree Show, Impact: University of Salford.

  • 2020 Tenacity: Terra-Kulture Art Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria.

  • 2019 A journey into Contemporary African Art, Beirut, Lebanon.

  • 2019 Love with Nature: Triple-A All About Art, Lagos, Nigeria.

  • 2018 Ubuntu Art Exhibition: Lagos, Nigeria.

  • 2018 Culture and Tradition - Same Experience, Different Local: The Koppel Project, London.

  • 2018 Triad Group Exhibition: Alexis Galleries, Lagos, Nigeria.

  • 2017 Everyday Humanity: Kanbi Contemporary Gallery, United Kingdom.

  • 2016 Ferrum Art House: Rele Art Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria.

  • 2015 Beyond All Odds: Thought Pyramid Art Centre, Abuja, Nigeria.

  • 2014 October Rain: Society of Nigerian Artists Show, Lagos, Nigeria.

  • 2012 Colour and Carnival 2: Calabar, Nigeria. 2011 Colour and Carnival 1, Calabar, Nigeria.

  • 2010 Generational Statement: Thought Pyramid Art Centre, Abuja, Nigeria.

  • 2008 Nigerian Cultural Landscape in Perspective: Abuja, Nigeria. 

AUCTIONS

 

  • 2020  Piasa African and Contemporary Art Auction, Paris, France.
  • 2019  Cabral Moncada Leiloes, Lisbon, Portugal.
  • 2019  Geneve Encheres, Switzerland.
  • 2019  Art House African Art Auction, Nigeria.
  • 2018  Piasa African and Contemporary Art Auction, Paris, France.
  • 2017  Piasa African and Contemporary Art Auction, Paris, France.
  • 2015  Bonham's Art Auction London, United Kingdom.
  • 2011  TKMG Art Auction, Lagos, Nigeria.

  • 2010  TKMG Art Auction, Lagos, Nigeria.