Artist Rugiyatou Jallow grew up between two distinct worlds: that of her “super Swedish” mother, and that of her “very West African” father. It’s a contrast explored in her covetable paintings, which confront identity, belonging and womanhood. We visit the Sweden-born Los Angeles-based artist at the tail end of a New York residency, during which her work evolved once more.
Throughout her artist residency in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Rugiyatou Jallow noticed passersby reacting to her paintings as they observed her at work through the floor-to-ceiling storefront windows of the Mack Art Foundation. “I can imagine that for people who don’t really look at art that it’d be fun to watch somebody painting. So I decided to keep the blinds up and let people view me,” she says. It couldn’t have hurt that Jallow herself paints a striking figure, tall and slim with flawless skin the colour of toffee. When we meet, she’s clad in her typical studio wear of black, paint-splattered athleisure and matching Yeezy clogs. As New York City looked at Jallow, she was looking back. Before the residency, which marked the Los Angeles-based artist’s first extended stay in the city, the settings of her paintings were vague. “I just felt so inspired walking around here,” she says. “I realised how much I love architecture… So I started trying it out in my work.” The four new paintings she completed during her time in Greenpoint incorporate architectural backdrops while the fore-grounds reflect more typical subject matter in Jallow’s practice to date: women rendered in a patchwork of skin tones, alluding to the artist’s mixed Swedish and Gambian an-cestry. Within the figures appear winding paths of string, affixed to the canvas. As the string partitions the colours of their skin, it’s symbolic of the elegant labyrinth that is the artist’s biography as she channels her multi-faceted identity into her paintings.
