Inioluwa Aboluwarin

Biography

Ini Oluwa is a self-taught visual artist from Nigeria. He is the Creative Director at Iriri Studios, a fast-rising art incubator, currently housing several brands across visual art, interior design, fashion, photography, events and film.

He is also the convener of Midiums, a bi-annual event that brings creatives (artists, designers, performers, photographers, writers, filmmakers and art enthusiasts) together over a 12-hour period of creativity, social engagement and content creation. Ini Oluwa is an Associate Director at Peppersoup Factory, an art collective that brings together over a hundred art enthusiasts for the purpose of telling socially-conscious stories via workshops, murals, discussions and painting sessions.

Since Ini started art full-time in 2016, more than being in his studio carefully putting brush and palette knife to canvas, he has worked with more than twenty organizations across ten different Nigerian states on various mural commissions, workshops and other community-centric art projects. Ini has his artworks in exhibitions and private collections in several countries around the world, including USA, Canada, Ghana and Switzerland. He was a TEDx speaker at Arkilla in 2017, and is a full member of the Society of Nigerian Artists.

Artist Statement

I am not a painter of things, people, scenes, ideas or happenings. I do not consider myself as such. I have always been inspired by that subtle quality of the human being that seems higher than language. How this has been represented by me – over time – is what leads to the seeming diversity in my body of work.

However, I am more at home in my ability to employ realism in representing this abstraction of the human essence.