Oluwaseun Olayiwola in conversation with Jake Grewal

This lecture is part of the Summer Term Creative Conversations series; dialogues between artists, curators and writers. Curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, lectures are held Wednesday evenings either at the School or online.

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Poet Oluwaseun Olayiwola and painter Jake Grewal come together to explore the emotional and physical landscapes that shape their work. In this conversation, they reflect on the role of the body, queerness, and vulnerability in their practices—unpacking how personal history and introspection inform their internal worlds.

Healing The Heart, 2025, oil on canvas, Jake Grewal

Please note this event is taking place in person at the Royal Drawing School and tickets are limited.

Jake Grewal draws from Western canons of painting, deftly harnessing the language of Romanticism and suffusing them with a queer gaze. Within his scenes, the artist frequently pictures nude figures, nearly always male and often based on his own image, to convey a sense of human fragility and communion with nature. The artist’s explorations of self find form in compositions distilled from an expansive personal library of visual references, shifting from art historical and cinematic sources to collected photographs and family images. Grewal’s latest works draw a line through to histories of plein-air painting, his scenes often appear more evocative of an interior, emotional world than based in any one location.

Grewal's recent exhibition at Studio Voltaire, Under The Same Sky, was his first solo institutional exhibition in London, following significant solo exhibitions at Pallant House Gallery (2023) and Thomas Dane Gallery (2022). His work is held in public collections such as Pallant House Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield, The British Museum, The Government Art Collection and The Royal Collection

Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. His creative and critical work has been published in: the Guardian, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Oxford Poetry, the Telegraph, the TLS and elsewhere. His choreographic work has been presented at the V&A, The Place, The Central School of Ballet, and Studio Voltaire. He’s been commissioned by Royal Society of Literature, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Southwark Council, and Studio 3 Arts. Seun has an MFA in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2018-2019. He recently began lecturing in dance in the Kingston School of Art. Seun is a member of the inaugural Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells.

Cover image: The Ceaseless Cycle of Erosion, 2024, oil on canvas in 3 parts, Jake Grewal