Luke Agada and the Architecture of Memory

In Luke Agada’s Of Tempest, Of Dreams, multiple figures occupy an uninscribed interior, their bodies folding into one another and slipping between figuration and abstraction. Art-historical echoes are difficult to ignore; Picasso’s Cubist fragmentation comes to mind, yet the palette is unmistakably Agada’s: warm browns, ochres, and muted tones. The hybrid figures and indeterminate setting make the painting difficult to locate. Are we in Lagos, Chicago, New York, or somewhere between memory and invention?

That sense of instability runs throughout Agada’s practice. Born in Lagos and now based in Chicago, he considers what it means to remain rooted while geography, culture, and identity are keep shifting. His paintings move between figuration and abstraction, memory and lived experience, allowing bodies and their surroundings to merge rather than settle into fixed form.

Agada’s own path to painting has similarly resisted a linear trajectory. Initially trained in veterinary medicine in Nigeria, he began as a self-taught artist before receiving his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. This September, he opens “When the Center Holds,” his first solo exhibition in New York City, at Sean Kelly. The exhibition takes its title from W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” reversing the poem’s assertion that “the center cannot hold” to ask instead what might still hold when everything else is in flux?

Ahead of the opening, and of Agada’s first solo museum exhibition at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis next year, Whitewall spoke with the artist about Lagos and Chicago, painting as a site of translation, and how a sense of rootedness might persist through change.

What Makes the Center Hold?

WHITEWALL: What was around you while you were making this body of work: books, images, or references you kept returning to?

LUKE AGADA: I look at catalogues and books a lot. I have catalogues of works in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the MET, because I make a lot of reference to historical works, especially from the 20th century. 

During the process of preparing for this show, I was reading Why Nations Fail. I’ve been reading it for a while, but I went back to it thinking about the origins of wealth and poverty of nations, the distribution of wealth, and why some nations are the way they are. Politics is embedded in our lives more than we know, whether economically or geographically. I was reading that and thinking about the current state of the world, the shifting global order, and shifting dynamics of power. I was also reading W.B. Yeats’s The Second Coming while looking at the writing of Chinua Achebe.

“Politics is embedded in our lives more than we know, whether economically or geographically,”

-Luke Agada.

WW: Both Yeats’s The Second Coming and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart circle this idea of structures breaking down. How did those texts lead you toward When the Center Holds?

LA: Yeats gives us this famous proposition that the center cannot hold – an image of a world in which established structures are breaking down and things are moving toward disorder. I saw a parallel between that and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where colonial power enters a society and doesn’t simply disrupt political structures, but fractures the cultural and spiritual systems through which people understand themselves. I didn’t simply want to respond to what Yeats was saying, reproduce his pessimism, or accept collapse as an inevitable conclusion. I became more interested in turning the proposition around and asking: What enables the center to hold?=

The center here isn’t necessarily a fixed geographical or political structure, or an institutional center. I’m thinking about something much more relational – things that allow us to endure and continue to make meaning when the structures around us become unstable. That might mean collective memories, kinship, a sense of belonging, or our capacity to adapt. The center, in that sense, isn’t something permanently given to us. It’s something we continually construct and sustain. That idea informs the sense of suspension that runs throughout many of the paintings in the show.

Luke Agada Between Uprooting and Rootedness

WW: That suspension is palpable. Bodies shift, architecture bends, yet the compositions never quite collapse. Can something remain stable without being fixed?

LA: I believe so. Nothing is exactly fixed, even in terms of identity. We’re exposed to life, images, and different cultures every day, so our worldview is constantly being reorganized and reshaped. There’s always a meeting point between the old and the new – the old ideology and the new ideology, the old you and the new you.

What’s important isn’t really that we’re moving or changing, but how we’re able to maintain stability within that change. When you look at the paintings, there’s a sense of movement, but things also seem to be where they’re supposed to be. There’s balance, even though there’s a lot of tension on the surface. I use composition and colour to create that balance and to give the figures within the space a sense of rootedness. That word: “rootedness” is important to me. When I relocated from Lagos to Chicago, I felt really out of place. I was nostalgic and quite lonely. The things that inspired my work visually were no longer there, so I turned to my memories, my imagination, and what I already knew.

That began to change the forms of the figures themselves. I began to understand that something was happening to my own sense of identity. It was like uprooting myself from my homeland and replanting myself in a different place. When you change location, your body doesn’t just move. Your state of mind changes as well. Being absorbed into a new ecosystem, a new society that I’m not used to, is a continual process. Integration is gradual.

WW: In Of Tempest, Of Dreams, it’s difficult to determine where the figure ends and the architecture begins. Bodies, furniture, and space seem to merge. When you begin a painting, what comes first?

LA: I start paintings in many different ways, but most times a painting begins with an idea in mind. I have a mental image or sense of the space that needs to be created, and I try to find references that help me pin that down. It might be a photograph, a fragment of a sketch, a remembered spatial encounter, or a colour. I take a lot of pictures whenever I go out or travel. I’m a collector of found images. The reference, however, functions more as a point of departure. It’s not necessarily a blueprint. Once the painting begins, I deliberately allow it to drift away from representation into a more instinctive and automatic process. I’m essentially trying to distill the image or form to its very essence.

Materially, the first layer usually starts with textured acrylic, which dries very fast, and then comes oil paint. When I’m working on the third or fourth layer, I’m sometimes cleaning and erasing, using my paint rag to expose the layer beneath. I’m interested in how space behaves when it’s no longer stable – when it becomes negotiated, compressed, and unsettled. Eventually, the forms respond less to an external image and more to the internal logic of the painting itself. I use gestural marks to create tension, and erasure and rhythm to create balance.

At that stage, instinct takes over. The work becomes a site of translation rather than depiction.

Drawing a Line Back to Lagos

WW: The exhibition also brings drawing into conversation with the paintings. What does drawing allow you to investigate differently?

LA: My practice actually started with drawing before I taught myself to paint. I don’t make drawings as studies; I usually return to drawing after a painting is finished, as a way of understanding marks I made instinctively.

Drawing is very honest because it’s transparent. With painting, you can build layers and cover things over, but with drawing, when you make a mark, it stays there. A line remains true. I think of the drawings as receding echoes of moments within the paintings that continue to call back to me.

“I want the work to inspire conversations and questions, to create room for dialogue rather than monologue,”

-Luke Agada.

WW: Lagos is often discussed in relation to your palette and the sunburnt quality of its light. Where does the city enter the work beyond colour?

LA: Lagos is where it all started for me because I was born and raised there. My introduction to art started on the streets of Lagos. You see creativity all around you, whether it’s intentional or unintentional. It can be quite chaotic. It’s almost like New York – there’s a whole lot going on, whether in terms of music, painting, or art itself.

I saw art on the streets of Lagos, and it was so colourful and alluring to me. The spirit of Lagos is something that has always amused me. The art scene in Lagos influenced me greatly, especially the artists, art spaces, and cultural spaces. It was one of my earliest inspirations and introduced me to many Nigerian and African pioneers. 

There’s also this radical spirit of questioning what you’re doing, thinking for yourself, and sometimes going against the grain. I believe that became part of how I learned to approach my own practice.

Spaces Between Worlds

WW: You’ve spoken about modernism as an important influence. Are those histories still present when you work?

LA: Very much so. They’re still very present in the room when I’m working and thinking about what I’m making. There was an exhibition curated by the late Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian curator, someone I really admire. An exhibition titled The Short Century. It challenged the idea that African art could be understood through one unilateral or monolithic definition of what African imagery is. There’s still so much that we’re exploring, even now, in what we call contemporary African art.

There has always been a back-and-forth influence. African sculpture influenced European artists like Georges Braque and Picasso and how they approached the figure and the construction of the artwork. That exchange is something that continues to interest me.

WW: When I first encountered your paintings, I thought of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysically charged environments. Are the architectural spaces in your work remembered, observed, or invented?

LA: I definitely love Giorgio de Chirico, amongst other Surrealist painters like Magritte and Max Ernst. I sometimes employ this Surrealist element of dream logic. 

I want the environment to feel familiar enough that you recognize something, but unfamiliar enough that you can’t completely locate yourself within it. I might overlap a street corner in Lagos with somewhere in Chicago, sampling tones and colors from both to create something new. The spaces are psychological to me as much as physical. They exist somewhere between memory and imagination.

Luke Agada on What Comes After 

WW: What do you hope viewers encounter first in the work?

LA: First, I want someone to enjoy it. There’s play in the work – the abstraction, the Surrealist gestures, and I think play is a good point of entry before we begin talking about something more serious or consequential.

Ultimately, I want the work to inspire conversations and questions, to create room for dialogue rather than monologue. I also want people to understand that identity isn’t fixed; cultural identity is continuously being shaped by our lived experiences.

WW: And what’s next? 

LA: I’m currently working toward two solo exhibitions in the coming year. The big one for me next is my first museum solo show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in St. Louis. I feel it’s a very special project coming up. I’m also going to have a solo show in Los Angeles with Roberts Projects.

For the museum show, I’ll be making new works, but I’m also going to bring back some older works to see where things are and how the work and the practice look from a glance. How it’s standing and, yeah, how it’s holding – how the center is holding.