Rising Artist, Adeboye Deconstructs Religion, Identity in New Solo Show

Yinka Olatunbosun

A Lagos-based artist, Joy Adeboye is set to showcase her fresh body of works titled “The Religion of Love.” Hosted by AMG Projects, the show marks a significant evolution in Adeboye’s practice, extending her exploration of intimacy, belief and the unseen architectures that shape human emotion.

Running from May 31st to July 5th at AMG Projects in Lekki Phase I, the exhibition parades works in watercolour with compositions suspended between presence and dissolution. Figures appear and recede, forms blend into one another, and colour becomes both material and metaphor.

These works resist fixed interpretation, instead inviting a contemplative engagement with ambiguity. Love, like faith, carries meaning that is both deeply personal and fundamentally indecipherable.

Adeboye, known for her delicate and ethereal watercolor technique, leads the viewer to a place where the boundaries between the spiritual and the sensual began to blur.

The exhibition, a deliberate departure from the rigidity of traditional religious art, felt less like a gallery show and more like a confession. The compositions are painted in a signature, muted palette of bruised pinks, deep crimsons, and soft, washed-out ochres.

In The Religion of Love, Adeboye doesn’t preach; she observes. Her figures—often female forms—emerge from the paper as if surfacing from a dream. They are not static icons of worship, but fluid, living beings, caught in moments of private contemplation. In one piece, a cluster of spectral figures appears to be dancing or perhaps grieving, their limbs intertwined in a way that suggests the collapsing of individual ego into a collective, sacred ritual.

The thematic heart of the exhibition lies in Adeboye’s deconstruction of how organised religion has historically policed the female body. She addresses this not with anger, but with a profound, quiet subversion.

“I wanted to reclaim the language of the sacred,” the artist noted in a previous conversation about her process. “If society has spent centuries hiding the sensuality of a woman behind veils and taboos, I wanted to bring it into the light, not as something to be judged, but as something to be revered.”

The recurring motif of flowers—delicate, ephemeral, yet deeply resilient—acts as a metaphor throughout the collection. In several pieces, petals seem to cascade across the bodies of the subjects, suggesting that the body is not just a site of discipline, but a garden of its own internal wisdom.

Walking through the exhibition, one gets the sense that the watercolor itself is a collaborator. The medium, which requires patience and a surrender of total control, mirrors the theme of the work: the act of letting go.

As a visitor moves from Magic, a haunting quadriptych that segments the body into fragments of memory, to the centerpiece titled The First Prayer, there was a palpable shift in the atmosphere. The heavy, gold-leaf frames that usually characterise Lagos’s more traditional art scene were absent here, replaced by simple, clean mounts that forced the viewer to focus entirely on the vulnerability of the paint-soaked paper.

By the time one reached the final wall, the silence of the room felt heavy with meaning. The Religion of Love does not demand allegiance. It asks only for presence. In an era where the world often feels fractured and loud, Joy Adeboye’s exhibition offers a soft, necessary return to the self—a reminder that love, in all its forms, is perhaps the only religion that requires no permission to exist.

Joy Adeboye’s “The Religion of Love” deepens the artist’s exploration of memory, spirit, and the quiet power of the female gaze.

At its core, The Religion of Love interrogates how individuals attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. Love and God, often invoked as absolutes, emerge here as parallel constructs, frameworks through which we attempt to understand feeling, longing and connection. Within Christian theology, the phrase ‘God is Love’ collapses the distinction between the divine and the emotional, suggesting that love itself might be the closest language we have for transcendence. Adeboye approaches this proposition not as doctrine but as inquiry.

The emotional and spiritual dimension of her practice, especially how she explores intimacy, faith, longing, and ambiguity through watercolour

Joy Adeboye (b/ 1988, Nigeria) is a Lagos-based contemporary artist whose practice has rapidly gained international recognition for its poetic and introspective engagement with the human condition. Working primarily in watercolour on paper, Adeboye explores the intersections of desire, religion and identity, producing works that exist in a state of flux- between presence and absence, the corporeal and the spiritual.

A graduate of Literature-in-English from Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife (2019) and an Msc in Mass Communication from Ajayi Crowther University (2025), her literary grounding continues to inform her visual language, which reads as both image and text, layered, open-ended and deeply reflective.

Adeboye’s career has been marked by a series of international and institutional milestones. In 2025, she was selected for the SAFFCA & MORE Foundation Residency at Lion Sands, South Africa, a highly regarded programme that brings together artists engaged in critical, research-led practices. This residency provided a pivotal period of reflection and development , directly informing the conceptual depth of her recent work.

She was featured in the Tomorrows/Today section of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair in 2025 while her work has also been presented across key exhibitions in Lagos and internationally, including Land of Plenty (2025) and The Vanguard (2024) at AMG Projects, as well as her solo presentation Chaos & the 8th Year at FNB Art Johannesburg. These presentations have solidified her as an artist capable of holding both intimate and expansive narratives, engaging audiences across different cultural contexts.

In addition to exhibitions, Adeboye has participated in workshops and residencies such as the Harmattan Workshop in Nigeria, further grounding her practice within a lineage of artistic exchange and experimentation.