Roberts Projects presents « Singular duality : Me can make we », an exhibition by artist Amoako Boafo featuring large-scale new works that investigate the pressure of inner and outer worlds, as well as the subtleties of light and shadow.
The exhibition « Singular duality : Me can make we » is open through November 06, 2021 at Roberts Projects in Culver City, USA. This exhibition by artist Amoako Boafo amplifies his work by addressing and observing blackness, while presenting enormous new subjects.
Arranged at an urgent crossroads between the artist’s vaunted method of figuration and the enhancement of a complex, visual language, these sublime new compositions present the shadow of the subject.
On the double associated with this isolated point, Amoako Boafo‘s figures are cryptically combined with their shadows. In each of the artist’s most recent works of art, the light actually casts a shadow, which transforms itself into an image by its own means.
Shadow and light do not mix with each other, rather they go against each other. The visual pressure, that is, the movements between positive and negative space, is a detour from the way subjects were recently painted in uniform light.
Amoako Boafo‘s boundless variety – identifying with both his characters and himself – never ceases to incite conversation about the subtleties of personality, region and race.
Amoako Boafo‘s characters, which depict individuals both within and outside his immediate circle, occupy the predominant space in each structure. The local settings and casual presentations provide insight into the associations between the artist and her characters.
Amoako Boafo‘s painting is, at its core, a profoundly close record of his and our reality at an unprecedented time. The envious mix of nostalgia and downpour reflects on her reality and ours: the Covid pandemic and its consequences, the effect of racial disparity, the impacts of notoriety, the adjustment of day-to-day existence, a dubious and ominous future.
With « Singular duality : Me can make we », he shifts from the broad representation of black people to representations that illustrate and include the totality of the human experience.
By depicting people from the diaspora and the past, emphasizing insight and magnificence, Amoako Boafo invites reflection on black subjectivity, explicitly in its variety and complexity.
His works are notable for their striking tones and examples, which praise his subjects as a way to challenge the representation that externalizes and dehumanizes blackness.
Who is Amoako Baofo?
Red Collar, 2021
Oil on canvas
84 x 108 in (213.4 x 274.3 cm
Raised in Osu, Accra, Ghana, Amoako Boafo studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra in 2007, before attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria.
Amoako Boafo was awarded the Jury Prize, the Walter Koschatzky Art Prize in 2017 and the STRABAG Art grant International in 2019, both in Vienna.£
His first independent exhibition in the United States, entitled « I See Me », opened at Roberts Projects in January 2019.
Amoako Boafo was the lead artist in residence at the Rubell Museum in Miami. In 2020, the artist worked with Kim Jones, Dior‘s creative director for the Dior Men Spring/Summer 2021 collection.
In 2021, Amoako Boafo was chosen by the Uplift Art Program to create the first « Suborbital Triptych » on the outer planks of a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket by billionaire Jeff Bezos.
