Toyin Alakija Adepoju

Artist Statement

As a physician and artist, my work lives where science, story, the human body and my Nigerian heritage meet. My paintings have grown out of two intertwined lineages: Nigerian fruits, foods and landscapes that shaped my earliest sense of color and pleasure, and years spent listening to patients, studying anatomy, and trying to find calm and purpose in an overwhelming healthcare system.

In the studio, I draw heavily on my medical training. Pieces like Twin Lungs, Trapped Lung, Takotsubo: Heart Breaking, Back Breaking, and More Mercy began as observations from residency and practice: the compressed, starved lung; the heart reshaped by stress; the patient bent under the weight of pills; the sickle cell warrior suspected instead of believed. I translate those experiences into surreal anatomy, geometric fragments, and layered hands, using sharp color contrasts—warm flesh against clinical blues, bright reds against deep indigo—to hold tension without turning away. The work is less about illustration and more about distilling a feeling: confinement, dismissal, resilience, mercy.

At the same time, I return again and again to fruit—agbalumo, paw paw, rose apples—not only because their forms are gorgeous and because food is healing, foundational medicine, but also because they carry specific memories: my mum and sister sharing an agbalumo, my grandfather arriving from Ijebu with crunchy unripe pawpaw, my grandmother introducing custard apples. In the studio, those fruits become characters. I push them toward abstraction, build up textured, expressive brushwork, and set them against bold, graphic grounds so that they feel both nostalgic and defiantly contemporary.

Across series, my goal is not to offer easy answers, but to create images that hold space for complexity—where pain, beauty, fear, and hope can coexist—and to invite viewers into a deeper, more compassionate relationship with their own bodies and stories