The subjects of Luke Agada’s paintings exist in a liminal state, as if in a waking dream. Treading the line between figurative and abstract, corporeal and ethereal, his spectral forms occupy a kind of third space—much like their creator, who left Lagos, Nigeria, in 2021 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “When you leave your home, your culture, your friends and move to the other side of the world, you are there physically, yes, but emotionally you are somewhere in between,” Agada says, describing the émigré’s feelings of displacement, discomfiture and disorientation. “Overlapping realities of time and space, past and present—my paintings reflect these hyphenated identities.”
