Jadé Fadojutimi and the Eye of the Storm: Why 'Untitled' (2025) Dominates Frieze London 2025
Jadé Fadojutimi, Untitled (2025), presented by Gagosian at Frieze London 2025. This powerful, large-scale abstract work, capturing the artist's "emotional landscape," commands attention within the bustling fair.
The VIP preview of Frieze London 2025 is a theater of managed desire. Inside the Regent's Park tent, the air is thick with the palpable energy of commerce, intellectual posturing, and the quiet hum of immense capital. It is a carefully constructed ecosystem where the world’s most influential collectors, curators, celebrities, and advisors converge, their presence a testament to the fair's status as a global cultural epicenter. Yet, this year, the gravitational center of this universe is undeniably the Gagosian gallery booth. Here, a crowd orbits a single object, their movements a carefully choreographed dance of reverence and acquisition. At the heart of this storm is a monumental new Jadé Fadojutimi painting, 'Untitled' (2025), by the young British artist whose ascent has been nothing short of meteoric. The painting is not merely an artwork on display; it is a cultural and economic event, a lightning rod attracting the most potent anxieties and aspirations of our time.
The scene at Gagosian is a ritual of cultural validation. The gallery's selection of an artist for a solo presentation at a fair of this magnitude is a powerful act of market and critical endorsement. The crowd is not just here to shop; they are participating in a collective affirmation of Fadojutimi's importance, cementing her status as one of the most vital young British artists today. In a world saturated with ephemeral digital images and algorithmically generated content, the central question becomes urgent: Why has this specific, hand-made object—a complex field of oil and acrylic on canvas—become the most coveted artifact at Frieze?
Deconstructing the Canvas: An Emotional Atlas
To stand before Untitled (2025) is to be enveloped. It is an immersive environment, a term the artist herself uses to describe her work. The monumental canvas, measuring 200 by 300 cm, is a maelstrom of color and line set against a searing, dominant ground of crimson red. This is not a passive backdrop; the red is an active, energetic field, its surface alive with the visible tracks of the brush. Upon this stage, Fadojutimi unleashes a riot of form and texture. Thick, sculptural loops of black and deep purple oil paint arc across the surface, their glossy impasto catching the light and creating a tangible sense of depth and motion.
Fadojutimi's physical and intuitive process is evident in her studio. She describes her act of painting as a direct channeling of "psychic energy" onto the canvas, a practice she has called "witchcraft."
This is a landscape of profound conflict, a visual battleground. The artist’s vibrant, electric palette is locked in a fierce struggle with these darker, more aggressive passages. We see hints of figuration—what Fadojutimi calls her "characters"—emerge and recede within the chaos. A pair of sunglasses, outlined in blue and purple, appears on the left; a skull-like orb, adorned with a yellow and black pattern, floats near the top right. Striped, bulbous forms jostle against dense thickets of linear work that suggest everything from tropical foliage to tangled circuitry. The sheer physicality of the work is arresting. Close inspection reveals the complex layering: washes of turquoise, flashes of acid yellow, and strokes of magenta are visible beneath the web of darker marks. The paint itself is a testament to the artist's energetic process, spilling over the edges of the canvas in a raw, uncontained gesture. This is not the "hope, joy, light and mischief" noted in some of her earlier exhibitions; this is a direct document of a more fractured and fraught emotional reality, rendered with visceral force.
Fadojutimi calls herself a "composer of colour" , and her process is deeply intuitive, almost shamanistic. She believes she has synaesthesia, stating, "when I feel emotion, I see a color and that's how my paintings come to life". Her canvases are direct translations of her internal state, what she terms "emotional landscapes". The physical, often nocturnal act of painting—running, dancing, sometimes crying at the canvas—is a force she calls "witchcraft," a direct channeling of psychic energy onto the surface. The aggression in the brushstrokes reflects the intrusion of the market's gaze into what was once a private, therapeutic space. Her work has always been a diary, a way to process a complex identity as a Black British woman of Nigerian heritage, straddling cultures and grappling with a sense of displacement. Influences from Japanese anime, for instance, are not superficial but a source for "a different way of translating human emotion". She travels to Japan yearly to "recharge," feeling her soul is "bonded to the country". In this new work, these layers of personal history now contend with the new reality of being one of the most speculated-upon figures in contemporary abstract art.
The Market as a Medium: Price vs. Value
Jadé Fadojutimi, The Woven Warped Garden of Ponder (2021). This painting sold for £1.6 million ($2 million) at Christie's, providing a concrete example of the artist's rapid and powerful ascent in the ultra-contemporary art market.
It is impossible to discuss this Jadé Fadojutimi painting without addressing the elephant in the room: the astronomical price tag and the frenzy of speculation that surrounds her work. From becoming the youngest artist ever to have work acquired by the Tate to achieving auction results that have soared past $1.9 million, Fadojutimi's career is a case study in the velocity of the ultra-contemporary art market. A closer look at her recent secondary market performance reveals a landscape of both staggering peaks and discerning selectivity. While major works such as Quirk my mannerism (2021) and Teeter towards me (2018) have commanded prices approaching $2 million, and pieces like The Pour (2022) have comfortably crossed the seven-figure threshold, the market is not uniformly frenzied. A robust middle-tier has formed, with numerous canvases from her coveted 2021 period, like Vibe with Me and A Glimmer of Our Twigs, consistently achieving results in the $600,000 to $800,000 range. However, this is not a market of blind speculation. The presence of withdrawn or passed lots for works from various periods indicates a discerning collector base that is not willing to chase every piece at any price. This volatility—the juxtaposition of record-shattering sales with moments of market discipline—is precisely what makes her a focal point. It demonstrates a market grappling in real-time with the valuation of a generational talent, placing her at the center of a recurring debate about a potential art market bubble, a symptom of the broader cultural State of Exhaustion.
From a Post-Luxury perspective, where value is derived from narrative and meaning rather than opulence, this situation presents a fascinating paradox. For an artist like Fadojutimi, the market has become an inseparable part of the work's medium. The discourse surrounding Untitled (2025) is inextricably linked to its formidable valuation, listed at a net price of 500,000 GBP. This forces a critical question: Does the price reflect the painting's value, or does the price now create its value? The market's obsession is, in fact, a symptom of a broader cultural search for Post-Luxury assets. In an age of mass-produced luxury and digital disposability, Fadojutimi's work represents a perfect confluence of desirable attributes: an authentic personal narrative, the evidence of tangible craft, profound cultural resonance, and extreme scarcity. The financial speculation is a proxy for a deeper speculation on meaning itself. In an era where the most desired commodity is a story made tangible, collectors are willing to pay an enormous premium for an object that so perfectly embodies the ideal of authenticity, navigating The Scarcity Paradox by acquiring something truly singular.
An Object of Intense Affection: On Collector's Desire
What motivates a collector to pursue this single object with such ferocious determination? The psychology is a complex spectrum, moving far beyond simple investment. Research into the psychology of collecting reveals a range of motivations, from a deep, aesthetic appreciation driven by a personality trait known as "Openness to Experience," to the pursuit of status and social differentiation. There is the connoisseur, driven by a genuine connection to the work's emotional power; the speculator, for whom the painting is a blue-chip asset in a volatile market; and the status-seeker, for whom acquiring the most talked-about painting at Frieze is an act of signaling immense cultural and economic capital.
Fundamentally, collecting is an act of identity construction. To "own" this Fadojutimi is to absorb its potent narrative—of youthful genius, emotional authenticity, and cultural prescience—into one's own self-image. The painting becomes a mirror, an extension of the self. This intense desire for a singular, unique object represents a profound yearning for Devotion & Care in a transactional world, a key tenet in the broader Art of Being. It stands in direct opposition to the logic of disposability that defines so much of contemporary consumption. However, a deep contradiction lies at the heart of this desire. The collector seeks an object that represents an escape from the superficiality of the market, yet they must engage in the most extreme, competitive, and status-driven version of that market to obtain it. The painting thus becomes a vessel for this unresolved cultural tension, allowing the elite collector to satisfy both the private desire for authentic meaning and the public desire for validation.
More Than a Market Darling?
It would be easy to dismiss the phenomenon surrounding Jadé Fadojutimi's 'Untitled' (2025) with cynicism, writing it off as another peak in a speculative art market bubble. But to do so would be to miss the painting's true significance. The work is powerful precisely because it is a nexus where the artist's private emotional world collides with the public spectacle of global capital. It forces us to confront uncomfortable but essential questions about the relationship between contemporary abstract art, money, and meaning.
The ultimate value of this Jadé Fadojutimi painting lies in its ability to embody the very contradictions it interrogates. The visual rupture in the fabric of the canvas can be read as the violent tear in our cultural landscape, a wound inflicted by hyper-capitalism and a pervasive crisis of meaning. But the composition does not end in chaos. New threads of color and line represent the artist's authentic, defiant, and deeply human mark-making. It is a thread of resilience. It suggests that even within a fraught and often cynical system, the act of creation—and the devoted contemplation of that creation—can still weave new forms of value. Untitled (2025) is therefore not merely a symptom of its spectacular market context, but a complex, beautiful, and ultimately hopeful response to it.
