ADA Contemporary Art Gallery presents through January 15, 2023 “Lines Through Time” an independent exhibition, highlighting a stunning new collection of works by Noldor Residency alumnus Foster Sakyiamah.
The “Lines Through Time” exhibition is a milestone in Foster Sakyiamah’s career, as it will be seen as the artist’s most memorable exhibition in Accra, the city he has called home for nearly 36 years, where he also attended the renowned Ghanatta College of Art & Design.
In his energetically unique range, Foster Sakyiamah turns to history by looking back at perhaps the most remarkable paintings in the history of twentieth century contemporary art, from Gaugin’s The Seed of the Areoi to Johannes Vermeer’s The Young Woman with the Pearl Ear. This sense of praise for the female appearance and the many facets of the male appearance is a theme that runs through her practice.
Foster Sakyiamah’s paintings are praised for their distinctive depictions of Ghanaian individuals and culture. They are immediately recognizable by their energetic variety and powerful straight and curved patterns.
Foster Sakyiamah‘s interest in the work of Malian photographic artist Malick Sidibé and Ghanaian-English photographer James Barnor, who typically dressed his subjects in designer clothing and placed them in deeply drawn settings and grounds, sparked his affection for the patterns.
In Akosua As Want, Gaugin’s dazzling demonstrative synthesis of The Seed of Areoi captures the glittering figure of a young Ghanaian woman whose body is energetically depicted by Foster Sakyiamah in monochromatic red skin situated bare. Holding what looks like a mango in her hands, the hero is placed on a cloth-covered table, as if to be served to the viewer, with a bushel of delicious natural product, while sloping differentiated blue vegetation waits in the wings. In this sense, serious areas of strength for tones and bright hues become tactile analogies for freedom, durability and femininity in his acrylic artworks.
In previous years, he first exhibited his work in a neighborhood booth in 2002; after his residency at Ghanatta, Foster Sakyiamah joined the renowned Noldor residency program as a home-based artist in 2021, after the committee conducted a studio visit in late 2020. Since then, he has had major exhibitions around the world, including New York and Switzerland, and his work is currently on display in a few institutional collections in Europe, such as the Se Tinat Collection in Spain, the Minotti Collection in Seoul, and the Sir David Adjaye Private Collection in Accra and London.
He uses reds, blues and discreet ladies wearing wide-brimmed caps and thin gloves, as well as dancers acting in sync. The figures emerge through fields of fluttering, serpentine lines that give these powerful pieces character and imperativeness. They wear clothes that fade into view. However, her work also has ethnocentric printed references to GTP, Ghana’s most memorable indigenous textile branch, launched in 1966 by Ghana’s president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.
Embraced by many Ghanaian women in all areas of today’s Afropolitan culture, references to the Ghana Textile Print make Foster Sakyiamah’s collection totally appealing to both international and local organizations.
Finally, whether depicting Ghanaian women at rest or deliberately introducing them into the high society setting, Foster Sakyiamah’s work celebrates and attempts to elevate women to the center of what he describes as an engaging typology.