Aaron Kudi (b. Bauchi, Nigeria) lives and works in London. His practice as an abstract painter holds two irresolvable forces in permanent suspension: the empirical and the devotional, the observed and the felt, the structure that seeks to name and the spirit that refuses.
Kudi develops large-scale works on glazed tarpaulin and cotton duck canvas in liquid metal, ink, enamel and acrylic. The studio operates as a living ecology where materials assert their own internal logic: liquid metal oxidising against enamel, surfaces cracking and healing under atmospheric pressure. These are not accidents to be corrected but conversations to be entered. The painter takes his body with him, and the body knows more than the mind has yet named.
His practice begins where one of the most urgent arguments in twentieth century modernism was made: the principled refusal, from non-western ground, to choose between ancestral visual knowledge and the formal language of international abstraction. It is grounded in Édouard Glissant's poetics of opacity: the right to exist in full complexity without being made legible on another's terms.
The act of painting is, for Kudi, a form of weeding the slow, sometimes violent cultivation of what must stay and what must go. Each work passes through iterative cycles of addition and subtraction, accumulation and erasure, until what remains could not have been arrived at any other way.
His current investigation, The Garden, Empty After They've Left, takes the Garden of Gethsemane not as a devotional subject but as an interior condition of what the ground absorbs when surrender and resistance occupy the same breath.
Kudi holds a BSc in Psychology and MSc in Social and Behavioural Sciences from UCL. He is completing his MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, 2026, and will present new work at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, New York, May 2026 with Adegbola Gallery