dialogue
Luke Agada | Artist
January 2026
8 min read
Luke Agada speaks about art as a lifelong instinct, first felt before it had a name, later understood as a way of thinking through the world. Trained in veterinary medicine before earning an MFA in Painting & Drawing, his shift toward art wasn’t an abandonment of science, but a reorientation: the same attentiveness turned toward social, psychological, and human systems.
Agada’s paintings hover between body and space, figuration and abstraction. Disembodied forms emerge, dissolve, and reassemble within dream-like grounds, guided by tension rather than resolution. A mark becomes a body when it carries vulnerability; it returns to space when it drifts into rhythm and atmosphere.
Working between reference and instinct, Agada allows paintings to move away from depiction toward translation. Memory, uncertainty, and adaptation shape his practice, holding images in a liminal state where meaning stays open, and where survival, movement, and becoming remain in constant negotiation.
Luke Agada. Photo courtesy of Luke Agada Studio.
You studied veterinary medicine but later switched to art and earned an MFA in Painting & Drawing. What prompted that shift?
”Ever since I can remember, I have always been an artist, though as a child, I didn’t yet have the language for it. I was simply drawn to assembling things, making images, and inhabiting my imagination. I spent a great deal of time alone growing up; I’m either making or reading, and whenever I went through any difficult or life-changing experience, the deep recesses of my imagination created a kind of “safe haven” for me.
Over time, I came to understand art as a gift; a doorway through which I could process my encounters with the world and make sense of it. In that way, art became inseparable from who I am, even as I pursued a career in veterinary medicine.
My decision to study veterinary medicine grew out of a genuine interest in medical science and life systems. However, as my practice matured, I realized that my curiosity extended beyond biological systems to include social, political, and psychological ones. Art became the space where I could investigate those larger questions with greater freedom and complexity. The shift wasn’t necessarily an abandonment of science but a reorientation of the same attentiveness toward human conditions.
The moment I chose to close the door on my veterinary practice and commit fully to my art practice was ultimately a matter of timing. It was not the most convenient moment, but it felt unmistakably right. I had been nursing the idea quietly for a few years prior, while juggling both paths. It was right when COVID began; the world was thrown into chaos, borders were closing up, systems were collapsing, there was mass hysteria and the heavy fog of uncertainty was palpable. I was living in Lagos at the time, the city where I grew up. The natural instinct was to play it safe, preserve stability and hold on to every form of security. It obviously didn’t look like the right time to take risks, yet I felt that if art was truly what I was meant to do for the rest of my life, then there was no better moment to fully commit. Something fundamental was shifting in the world, and I felt compelled to change with it.
There was a deep, intuitive knowing in my spirit that this was the path I was meant to take.”
Luke Agada, The Things That Stayed, Oil on canvas, 72 x 72 in, 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery.
Your paintings often feature “disembodied figures and dream-like grounds, ” hovering between figuration and abstraction. How do you approach this boundary in practice, what guides when a painting becomes “body” or “space”?
”When making a painting, I consider the many elements that must work together to produce what might be understood as compelling imagery; one that also has the ability to strongly capture a conceptual thought. I consider how a painting performs to present the illusionistic idea of an image. I often think carefully about how the different parts play together such as the scale implications of space and body, the color associations and gestures that make for the right amount of tension and the overall compositional balance. I try to suggest a sense of movement within the space, whether a figure seems to be sitting still or in motion, there is an acute awareness of how it is adapting to the space it’s becoming a part of. To be in a state of adaptation is to be constantly changing, to remain at the liminal space of formation and dissolution.
What guides this transition is tension. When a mark starts to carry weight, vulnerability, or resistance, it begins to read as a body. When it dissolves into rhythm, repetition, or atmosphere, it returns to space. I’m attentive to the moment when a form refuses to be fully named, when it hovers between recognition and ambiguity. That is usually where I stop pushing it.
I think my work inhabits this space of liminality quite deliberately; not to resolve the tension between abstraction and figuration, but to hold it open. I’m interested in what happens when forms flicker at the edge of recognition, when a figure begins to dissolve into gesture, or when space feels simultaneously architectural and dreamlike. I often ask myself, how one might preserve a memory or hold it in place. There are elements of memory and experience that resist language. These thresholds allow for what I think of as imaginative realism, not realism as mimicry of the visible world, but as a way of making visible the emotional, psychological, and historical forces that shape how we see and remember.”
Installation view: Luke Agada, Between Two Suns, at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects. Photo by Paul Salveson.
When you start a painting, do you work from reference (photos, memory, sketches), or let forms evolve more spontaneously, using automatism and instinct?
”I rarely see these approaches as oppositional. For me, a painting might begin with a reference; often a photograph, a fragment of a sketch, or a remembered spatial encounter. I avidly collect found images, and my choices are often guided by a color palette that alludes to a particular memory.
The reference, however, functions more as a point of departure than a blueprint. Once the painting begins, I deliberately allow it to drift away from representation into a more instinctive and automatist process. It’s sometimes about the handling of paint for me, an understanding of the nature of the material and how each layer responds to the next on a flat surface, as I am sometimes making a space that can only exist in a painting.
Space is central to this shift. I am interested in how space behaves when it is no longer stable,when it becomes negotiated, compressed, or unsettled. As forms evolve, they respond less to an external image and more to the internal logic of the painting: gesture, tension, erasure, and rhythm. At that stage, instinct takes over, and the work becomes a site of translation rather than depiction.”
Luke Agada, Synapses No. 2, Charcoal on canvas, 22 x 18 in, 2024. Photo courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects.
In a global, fast-moving art world, how do you maintain authenticity and personal voice, especially when demand, expectations, exhibitions accumulate?
“As I observe a world that has gotten increasingly noisier, I try to protect solitude as a necessary part of my practice. The art world moves very quickly, and with that speed comes a constant layering of expectations; deadlines, visibility, production, interpretation. For me, maintaining authenticity means creating distance from that noise, even if only temporarily. I value spending time alone, because it’s in those quieter moments that I can listen to the unfiltered voice of my imagination rather than the external demands placed on the work.
Solitude allows for introspection. It also allows for doubt, hesitation, and discovery to coexist. That’s often where the work recalibrates itself; where I remember why I started making images in the first place. It’s where dreams take shape, and where the “miracle of making” begins, before the work is asked to perform in the world.
Practically, this also means working at a pace that allows the paintings to resist immediacy. I’m careful not to let momentum dictate meaning. When exhibitions accumulate, I return to Process as a way of staying grounded. That process becomes an anchor, helping me maintain a personal voice that evolves organically rather than being shaped by expectation.“
Luke Agada, Transfiguration (MFL), Charcoal and canvas on wooden panel, 17 ¼ x 40 ¾ in, 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery. Photo by Bob.
In your 2024 show Between Two Suns (Los Angeles, Roberts Projects), you explored bodies “between worlds, ” states of adaptation and survival. What did you hope viewers would feel when they entered that exhibition space?
“I hoped they would feel a quiet sense of suspension; an awareness of being held in an unstable, in-between state rather than anchored to a fixed narrative. The exhibition was conceived as an experiential space that mirrors conditions of displacement, adaptation, and survival, inviting viewers to slow down and sit with uncertainty rather than resolve it.
Through the conversations the works generate, I wanted to offer a visual meditation on hybridity and the precarious balance between endurance and dissolution. By refusing the structural comfort of definitive meaning, the paintings leave room for viewers to confront their own assumptions about identity, migration, and shared space.
Ultimately, the question of what home means, or where we choose to locate it remains fluid. In my practice, these concerns are rendered through layered textures, fragmented bodies, and rhythmic compositions that echo the constant push and pull of life lived at the margins, where survival itself becomes an ongoing act of negotiation.
Luke Agada, Othered vignette, Oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in, 2025. Photo courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery.
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