Born in London, Akinfe trained at the Slade School of Fine Art before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2023. Her references are as eclectic as they are assured. “A lot of my inspiration comes from a mixture of Renaissance aesthetics/techniques and pop culture references,” she tells The Wick.

Witness Fame Is a Gun, shown with Ginny on Frederick at this year’s Frieze Focus. The title nods to Addison Rae’s song of the same name; the composition borrows the dramatic foreshortening of Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ (c. 1483). It is a pairing that ought to jar and instead feels inevitable. Music runs through the work like a soundtrack, with Solange, Frank Ocean and grime all in the mix, while her peers and family remain a constant source of inspiration.

Akinfe’s Champion is Nengi Omuku, the Nigerian painter whose own figures inhabit dreamlike, imagined landscapes of interior experience. For Omuku, RM9 5AN is a particularly compelling demonstration of Akinfe’s gift for drawing home onto the canvas.

“Okiki’s paintings hold belonging with remarkable clarity and tenderness. In RM9 5AN, her first institutional solo exhibition at PEER in East London, she transformed the textures of Dagenham, from its shopfronts and food to its litter and wildlife, into a felt portrait of home. To me, her landscapes are also portraits of the city. They are rendered with a specificity that feels singular and entirely her own. In doing so, she expands landscape painting as a genre and broadens what it can hold. I am particularly moved by the way she allows memory to open onto questions of class, Black British identity and who is permitted to occupy public space.”

It has been a defining season. At Frieze London this October, three of Akinfe’s works were acquired for Abbot Hall in Kendal through the inaugural Dasha Shenkman Focus Fund, facilitated by the Contemporary Art Society, a significant institutional endorsement for an artist so early in her career. She also takes her place in British Art Show 10, a milestone Omuku is especially delighted to see.

“Her inclusion in British Art Show 10 feels both timely and entirely deserved. Okiki brings attention to the language and history of painting while making work that is unmistakably rooted in the present. There is wit, intelligence and quiet resistance in her images, but also generosity. She invites us to look again at places and lives that are too often overlooked. I believe hers is a vital, distinctive voice, and one that will continue to deepen and surprise.”

With the whirl of exhibitions behind her, Akinfe is turning inwards, and outwards, in search of what comes next. “I’m excited to be back in the studio, after PEER, British Art Show and Frieze, I’m taking a little time to experiment and look at things differently,” she says. “I’m also heading on some trips to see what that can bring into the work, with details of further shows coming soon!”