About
The primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating, and showing new ways to approach Blackness.
—Amoako Boafo
Amoako Boafo reimagines the canon of portraiture, emerging as a key artist in defining the contemporary culture of Africa and the African diaspora. His elegant paintings elevate his subjects, capturing their confidence, style, and character. To depict the figures in his portraits, Boafo manipulates pigment with his fingers rather than with a brush, tracing gestures through direct touch.
Boafo was born in 1984 in Accra, Ghana, where he currently lives and works. After teaching himself to draw and paint as a child, he pursued various professions in his early career, most notably semiprofessional tennis. He graduated from Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra in 2008, winning the college’s award for best portrait painter that year. In 2013, Boafo relocated to Vienna, and with artist and curator Sunanda Mesquita founded WE DEY, a center for exhibitions, workshops, and community programs that advocated for artists of color and LGBTQ+ voices.
Encountering the marginalization of Black people in Austria, Boafo decided to focus on portraits of Black subjects, who remain underrepresented in global contemporary art. Inspired by the expressionistic portraiture of Vienna Secession artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, he counts among his contemporary influences Jordan Casteel, Maria Lassnig, Kerry James Marshall, and Kehinde Wiley.
Photo: Emma Chang
#AmoakoBoafo
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Art Fair
Art Basel Hong Kong 2024
March 27–30, 2024
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre
www.artbasel.com
Gagosian is participating in Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 with a selection of works by international contemporary artists. The works on view, which embrace a dizzying variety of subjects and approaches, see the participating artists identify fresh ways to disrupt established histories of abstraction and figuration, and instill sculptural and painterly representations of the natural world with complex cultural significance.
Sarah Sze, Turning and Turning, 2024 © Sarah Sze. Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Art Fair
ART SG 2024
January 19–21, 2024, booth BC06
Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore
artsg.com
Gagosian is pleased to participate in the second edition of ART SG, with a selection of works by international contemporary artists including Harold Ancart, Georg Baselitz, Ashley Bickerton, Amoako Boafo, Dan Colen, Edmund de Waal, Nan Goldin, Lauren Halsey, Hao Liang, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Tetsuya Ishida, Alex Israel, Donald Judd, Y.Z. Kami, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Rick Lowe, Takashi Murakami, Takashi Murakami & Virgil Abloh, Nam June Paik, Ed Ruscha, Jim Shaw, Alexandria Smith, Spencer Sweeney, Stanley Whitney, Jonas Wood, and Zeng Fanzhi. The works on view, which embrace a wide variety of subjects and approaches, find artists infusing traditional genres such as history painting, portraiture, and landscape with new and surprising ideas that traverse cultural and temporal boundaries.
Gagosian’s booth at ART SG 2024. Artwork, left to right: © ADAGP, Paris, 2024, © Jonas Wood, © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Ringo Cheung
Fundraiser
Artist Plate Project 2022
Coalition for the Homeless
Launching May 22, 2023, 10am edt
Limited-edition bone china plates produced by Prospect and featuring artwork by more than forty artists—including Virgil Abloh, Derrick Adams, Harold Ancart, Georg Baselitz, Amoako Boafo, Mark Grotjahn, Takashi Murakami, Albert Oehlen, Ed Ruscha, Anna Weyant, and Jonas Wood—will be sold through Artware Editions to raise funds for the Coalition’s lifesaving programs. The funds raised by the sale of the plates will provide food, crisis services, housing, and other critical aid to thousands of people experiencing homelessness and instability. The purchase of one plate can feed one hundred homeless and hungry New Yorkers.
Takashi Murakami, Gargantua on Your Palm, 2018 © 2018 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All rights reserved
Museum Exhibitions
On View
Some Dogs Go to Dallas
Through May 12, 2024
Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas
www.greenfamilyartfoundation.org
Some Dogs Go to Dallas presents a selection of works from the collection of Pamela and David Hornik. Ardent dog lovers, the Horniks have a penchant for acquiring pieces depicting canines across eras, locations, and techniques from throughout the art historical canon. The diversity of this collection underscores the universality of the human connection with animals and the profoundly enduring love that those bonds create. Work by Amoako Boafo and Andy Warhol is included.
Installation view, Some Dogs Go to Dallas, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, February 10–May 12, 2024. Artwork, left to right: © Amoako Boafo, © Maggie Ellis. Photo: Evan Sheldon
On View
Amoako Boafo in
Singular Views: 25 Artists
Through October 6, 2024
Rubell Museum, Washington, DC
rubellmuseum.org
Singular Views: 25 Artists is drawn entirely from the Rubell Museum’s collection and encompasses over 120 artworks in a range of mediums. The exhibition features solo presentations of twenty-five artists from across the United States and around the world. Work by Amoako Boafo is included.
Amoako Boafo, Hudson in a Baby Blue Suit, 2019 © Amoako Boafo
On View
Revolutions
Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960
Through April 20, 2025
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu
Revolutions is a major survey of 270 artworks by 126 artists from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s permanent collection. Celebrating the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, the exhibition aims to capture the shifting cultural landscapes of a century defined by new currents in science and philosophy and ever-increasing mechanization. Shown alongside these historic works are contributions from nineteen contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate how many revolutionary ideas from a hundred years ago remain critical today. Work by Francis Bacon, Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Rick Lowe, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Cy Twombly is included.
Rick Lowe, Fire #4: This Time Athens, 2023, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC © Rick Lowe Studio
Closed
Amoako Boafo
Soul of Black Folks
July 13–September 10, 2023
Seattle Art Museum
www.seattleartmuseum.org
Soul of Black Folks, the first solo museum exhibition of Amoako Boafo’s work, presents more than thirty paintings created by the artist between 2016 and 2022. Curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah, the exhibition originated at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, and traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Boafo uses vibrant colors and textured paint—often applied with his fingertips—to create intimate and potent portraits centering Black subjectivity, Black joy, the Black gaze, and radical care.
Amoako Boafo, White on White, 2019 © Amoako Boafo