Latest news with #AmoakoBoafo
CNN
30-06-2025
- Business
- CNN
These African creators promote powerful historical values through art and architecture
Ghanaian visual artist Amoako Boafo utilizes his unique perspective on African identity to create remarkable portraits that have broken auction records worldwide. From Côte d'Ivoire, architect Issa Diabaté is designing and developing sustainable urban living models that he considers are the proper way to build the Africa of the future.
CNN
30-06-2025
- Business
- CNN
These African creators promote powerful historical values through art and architecture
Ghanaian visual artist Amoako Boafo utilizes his unique perspective on African identity to create remarkable portraits that have broken auction records worldwide. From Côte d'Ivoire, architect Issa Diabaté is designing and developing sustainable urban living models that he considers are the proper way to build the Africa of the future.
BBC News
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Documentary Podcast Amoako Boafo: Creating space to celebrate Blackness
The Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo has attracted global fame for his bold and sensual portraits. He paints bodies and faces using his fingertips instead of a brush, capturing form through direct, tactile gestures. When he went to art school in Vienna, he was struck by the extent to which Black subjects had been overlooked in global art. Determined to change the status quo, he drew inspiration from early 20th Century Viennese artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and added his own techniques to invent a fresh new style of portraiture. Lucy Ash follows his preparations for a major new show at Gagosian in London. It involves a transformation of the gallery space into a full-scale recreation of a Ghanaian courtyard – just like the shared space in which he was raised. With the help of his collaborator, Glenn De Roché, an architect famous for community buildings and with an artist friend who produced a set of playing cards, especially for the event. This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from In the Studio, exploring the processes of the world's most creative people.
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘I did it for the experience': Amoako Boafo, the artist who painted Jeff Bezos's rocket ship
Not every artist who skyrockets to fame makes it all the way into space. But that was the case for Amoako Boafo who, three years after his big break, painted three panels on the top of Jeff Bezos's rocket ship. 'I'll be honest, I just did it for the experience,' says the Ghanaian artist, whose triptych blasted off in August 2021 and returned (intact) after an 11-minute round trip. If the opportunity should arise, would he ever be interested in taking a tour himself? 'No, I like it here,' he replies, tapping the ground with his green Dior trainers. Boafo's artistic breakthrough came when his effervescent portraits celebrating Black life caught the eye of Kehinde Wiley on Instagram in 2018. Wiley, the African American artist best-known for painting Barack Obama, tipped off his galleries, and before long Boafo's canvases, which he began exhibiting in hotel lobbies back home in Accra, were appearing at international art fairs and fetching up to seven figures at auction. A spring/summer collection in collaboration with Dior designer Kim Jones followed in 2021, and in 2022 he was picked up by mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, who has referred to him as 'the future of portraiture'. His first solo UK show has just opened at Gagosian's largest London outpost. 'For me, this exhibition is a gentle reminder of what I want to do when I step away,' says Boafo in the gallery, over the whirr of nearby construction work. The opening is three days away when we speak, and yet it's still very much a work-in-progress, with paintings leaning against the walls and the courtyard of Boafo's childhood home mid-recreation next door. Returning our gaze are the artist's friends and family, as well as five of Boafo's self-portraits – pedalling on an exercise bike, lounging in bed, embracing his young son. These are more self-portraits than he's ever included in a single show. 'I want to remind myself that I don't always have to be out there, rushing around.' Born in 1984, Boafo grew up in Accra. His father was a fisher, and his mother cooked and cleaned. From a young age, he found art to be a respite: 'Whenever I would sit and draw, I wouldn't think about anything else; it was as if there were no problems.' He was as nifty with a racket as he was with a pencil, and believing that he might have a better shot at earning a living as a tennis player, he threw himself into the sport while studying art on the side. 'I managed to convince myself that I was going to make money from tennis and that when I retired I could paint,' he says. But after four years at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design he found he enjoyed painting more. I ask him if he still plays tennis, and he inches up the hem of his trousers to reveal a pair of Nike socks. 'I don't see anyone who's 40 years old in this world beating me.' In 2014, Boafo moved with his partner to Vienna, where he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. 'At first I had all this space and time, and I didn't know what do with it,' he says, comparing it with the more supervised teaching he was used to at home. Surrounded by white faces, he decided to focus solely on Black subjects. Poised between figuration and abstraction, his expressive portraits are at once rooted in tradition and wholly contemporary, borrowing from Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele as much as Toyin Ojih Odutola and Amy Sherald. What sets them apart is the technique that has become synonymous with his name: modelling the skin of his sitters with his fingertips.0 'I mean, it's not as beautiful as painting with a brush, but it allows me to be more playful,' he says, as we stand up and stroll around the room. 'With fingerpainting you have no control, and I like the challenge. You can't go over it – if you do, it's kaput.' Up close the effect is mesmerising: ripples of bright blue and brown appear to pulse, blood-like, along his sitters' limbs, lending them a sense of vitality that's hard to shake. The poses are static, but contained within the smears and swirls of a single hand – even an ear – is a rhythmic movement, a fizzing energy. Some backdrops are plain, others patterned with the same wrapping-paper designs that appear on the sitters' clothes. At first, Boafo used African fabrics, but the majority here came from Vienna. 'I love fashion,' he says, in case I couldn't tell from the cream-coloured baseball cap (also Dior), 'and after a while I realised I could just make my own prints and dress someone the way I want them to look or according to how I feel and what I want to say.' Unusually for Boafo, he isn't wearing anything patterned today, but his green overshirt and trainers echo the zingy palette of a large self-portrait featuring lush potted plants. 'I like to look like my paintings,' he says. 'It's not like I paint one way and then have a different character. The way I live is the way I paint.' By now, the drilling has stopped, so we head next door to see how his childhood courtyard is coming along. Soon it will be hung with paintings, but at present it's bare, an abstracted artefact made from charred wood – a nod to the fire on which Boafo's mother cooked their meals growing up. Located at the heart of most traditional residences in Accra, the courtyard is a communal space where family and friends come together. 'For me, it's a space of knowledge and learning,' says Boafo, 'a space where you get to see how people live.' Like his paintings, it's a celebration of community. The courtyard has been recreated by architect and designer Glenn DeRoché, who worked with Boafo on | Ogbojo, the writers' and curators' residency programme he established on the edge of Accra in 2024. As the appreciation for African art continues to grow in the west, Boafo believes that what's needed is more education back home. 'There's a lot of talent, but we still depend on the west to collect and to maintain it,' he says. 'I think there should be more education on collecting, because once we have home-based collectors, careers can be more sustainable.' More residencies are cropping up, among them one Boafo and DeRoche are working on specifically for sculptors. Boafo also has plans for an art club – 'a proper creative space where you come and just be inspired' – as well as a tennis academy and a football academy. But first, DeRoché needs to finish the court he's building for Boafo, who wants to play more tennis. 'I'm not stopping painting – I can't,' he says. 'I paint when I'm on holiday, I paint when I'm sick. Painting is part of me. But this is my last gallery show for now.' Is he feeling the pressure that comes with being the so-called future of portraiture? He says it's inevitable, but that to be in the position he's in is a dream come true. 'So, yeah, I will complain about the stress, but I can take it, I'm good.' Amoako Boafo: I Do Not Come to You by Chance is at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill, London, until 24 May
CNN
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Inside Ghanian painter Amoako Boafo's rise to art-world stardom
Amoako Boafo is in a buoyant mood. The 40-year-old Ghanian painter is about to open his first London show, 'I Do Not Come to You by Chance,' at a UK outpost of the American mega-gallery, Gagosian. It's an exhibition showcasing a new body of figurative paintings –– joyful, empowering portrayals of Black men and women, wrought in his distinctive lionized style and pairing fingertip-painting with paper-transferred patterns and blocks of color. In one, a woman stands, hands on hips, draped in white lace; another depicts Boafa himself, on a bicycle, clad in gold chains and chintz. Eshewing a conventional 'white-cube' gallery setting, sections of the space are covered in patterned wallpaper. More strikingly, one room is filled with a life-size recreation of the courtyard at Boafo's childhood home in Ghana's capital, Accra. 'The idea of bringing the courtyard situation to London is me bringing home with me,' said Boafo over Zoom. 'The courtyard is a space where I got to learn about almost everything: how to take a bath, how to take care of yourself,; how to sit quietly and listen, how to be disciplined.' Boafo's rise to art-world stardom has been swift and significant. In 2018, as he was finishing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Austria, American artist Kehinde Wiley found his art on Instagram. 'He suggested my work to his galleries,' said Boafo, 'which was when things started picking up.' By December 2021, one of his paintings, 'Hands Up,' had sold for over 26 million Hong Kong dollars ($3.4 mililon) at Christie's, setting an auction record for his work. Along the way, there was a residency at the Rubell Museum in Miami, owned by renowned collectors Don and Mera Rubell. Boafo signed with galleries in Los Angeles (Roberts Projects) and Chicago (Mariane Ibrahim). 'Then Dior happened,' he said, referencing his collaboration with the French fashion house on its Spring-/Summer 2021 menswear collection, 'and it didn't slow down.' Three of Boafo's paintings were even sent into space –– on exterior panels of a Blue Origin rocket. 'I realized that maybe (my career is) never going to slow down –– and it never did.' Boafo was born in Accra in 1984; his father died when he was young and he was raised by his mother, who worked as home help, cooking and cleaning for different families. He developed a childhood love of art. 'It was one of the ways that kids in the community got together: to draw,' he recalled. 'I had always wanted to go to art school but, because of financial difficulties, I did not manage to.' Instead, Boafo ended up on the tennis court and played semi-professionally for several years, until a man Boafo's mother worked for offered to pay his first tuition fees for Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra. The four-year course taught him to draw and to paint. But he also took lessons from the tennis court: 'not to sit idle; whatever happens, you move,' said Boafo. He moved to Vienna, went back to school and developed the painterly 'language' that has since made global waves. 'He was confronting the ideology that art history has to be within a Eurocentric form,' said French-Somali gallerist Mariane Ibrahim, who supports emerging artists of African descent across galleries in Chicago, Mexico and Paris. 'To purposely deconstruct traditional portraiture and figuration was really an act of rebellion, but also an act of making and creating your own history. I felt a connection in our experiences: being away from home in a place that doesn't have much of an African- diaspora community.' Today Boafo sits front and center of an art-world reappreciation of Black figuration. 'He's the head of a locomotive of a new generation of painters from West Africa and beyond,' said Ibrahim. The subjects of his paintings are his friends and family, and, frequently, himself, because, Boafo said, 'I don't see why I should not be present when I am representing my people.' The paintings are a visual representation of Boafo's desire to slow down and take stock. He hopes to work on one more exhibition with a similar theme in a different location –– 'and then I will step away from making paintings for shows,' he said, continuing to explain that 'I want to take a bit of break because I have other projects that I am passionate about –– like architecture and tennis. I want to build my own tennis academy, to develop (sports initiatives) so that the youth have something to do.' At Gagosian in London, the new self-portraits –– including one of his largest paintings to date, in which Boafo reclines on a bed, swathed in floral patterns and surrounded by plants –– have an added poignancy. They act as 'a reminder of the things that I want to do,' he said. 'It's a reminder to take a break and do yoga. Take a break and go on a bike ride. Take a break and look pretty and beautiful. Take a break and, sometimes, just stay home and relax.' With his work now held in major museum collections, from London's Tate and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris to New York's Guggenheim and the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., Boafo has become something of a local celebrity in Accra. 'Sometimes you wake up in the morning and you have 10, 15 people at your door waiting to talk to you,' he said. 'Everybody wants to put their problems in front of you. There's some joy (in it) and there's some stress.' He is enmeshed in the local community through his initiative — an artists' residency, launched in 2022, that has since expanded to host writers and curators. Crucially, it offers spaces that foster experimentation and allow participants 'to evolve or think on (their) own', he said, adding: 'I imagine to be an institution which should live beyond me.' Working alongside other creatives is key to Boafo's practice. He frequently collaborates with Glenn DeRoché, the architect behind the courtyard constructed in London, a sculptural installation that also houses some of Boafo's paintings. 'It was the perfect opportunity to pair what we both enjoy: working within communities, but also storytelling through what we create,' said DeRoché, sitting in the middle of the reimagined Accra courtyard, which has been reinterpreted and abstracted in a charred black timber structure. 'I thought it was a beautiful way to start the show, with the seed of Amoako's creativity, his ancestral birth home, but also to tell a story about community.' Boafo may soon be shifting his creative focus, but the act of painting is a constant. 'I'm always going to paint,' he said. 'It makes me feel good. I will not be making paintings for gallery exhibitions. I'm just going to be painting for myself, to keep reminding myself of where I am and where I want to be –– you know, taking care of me.' 'I Do Not Come to You by Chance,' at Gagosian in Grosvenor Hill, London, is showing from April 10 to May 24, 2025.
