Amoako Boafo

Overview

White Overgrip, 2023 Oil on canvas, 2023

Untitled, 2019 Oil on canvas, 2019

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Amoako Boafo uses painting to create his enticing characters and honour Black figures’ place into the pictorial tradition of the Portrait. His elegant paintings elevate his subjects, capturing their confidence, style, and character. He is regarded as a notable young voice in art of the African Diaspora through his new approaches to the shaping of Black forms, and their dispositions in a larger global context.

Boafo’s portraits are enticing in their lucidity. The brushstrokes are thick and gestural, the contours of the body almost soften into abstraction. Accentuated and elevated figures are often isolated on single colour backgrounds, their gaze the focal point, to disrupt observations from canonical viewership.

Boafo’s self-portraits are autobiographical explorations of his embodied self, expressions of vulnerability and creativity that challenge traditional narratives of masculinity. Other paintings represent men, women, and couples, with subjects chosen from friends and others he admires. They convey individuality and an active presence, with most of the figures locking eyes with the viewer and asserting a strong sense of identity.

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Exhibitions

Biography

Boafo studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design, Accra, Ghana before attending the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria. In 2017, he was awarded with the jury prize, Walter Koschatzky Art Prize and the STRABAG Art award International in 2019 both in Vienna, Austria.

The same year, he was the artist in residence at the Rubell Museum Miami, with the works completed during his stay comprising the museum’s inaugural one-artist exhibition ‘Soul ofBlack Folks,’ a traveling solo exhibition of over thirty portrait paintings, was organised in 2021–22 by the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco.

Boafo is widely collected by private and public collectors and institutions, most recently by the Leopold Museum (Vienna,Austria); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA); Solomon R. GuggenheimMuseum (New-York, NY); Marie luise Hessel Collection Hessel Museum of Art(Annandale-On-Hudson, NY); Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-On-Hudson,NY); The Albertina Museum Vienna (Austria); the Rubell Museum(Miami, FL); The Blenheim Foundation, (Woodstock, Oxfordshire, UK); Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis MI, US) and the Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris, France).

In December 2022, Boafo opened dot.ateliers, a space intended to strengthen and advance the cultural ecosystem of Accra. It features a gallery, studios, an art library and a café, and offers exhibitions and residencies thatencourage creative experimentation and support bold expression.

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