Gideon Appah’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom as well as his first exhibition with Pace Gallery in London, entitled “How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights,” is a unique opportunity for art lovers to discover one of the most intriguing and fascinating artists of the moment. Occupying the entirety of Pace’s Hanover Square gallery, this exhibition highlights the artist’s unwavering commitment to experimenting with scale, form, color and composition.
Gideon Appah, whose artistic practice centers on a fascination with the intangible, creates dreamlike, enigmatic paintings that transcend the boundaries of language and communicate deep emotions. Her idiosyncratic paintings interweave fragments of reality and imagination to construct mystical, painterly scenes that resist narrative and classification.
In “How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights,” Gideon Appah presents new paintings in his distinctive style that occupy the blurred space between imagination and memory. The artist’s large paintings place the viewer in the position of voyeur, stumbling upon secret or private meetings in otherworldly landscapes. The subjects are attentive to their surroundings, both electrified and intertwined with the ripples of the environment.
Gideon Appah‘s paintings are characterized by the use of flattened perspectives and ambiguous environments, evoking ethereal landscapes that seem to exist outside the physical world. The color palette of rich, precious blues, reds, pinks and greens draws the viewer into Gideon Appah’s cinematic world.
Gideon Appah draws from a wide range of visual sources to create her paintings, including childhood memories and family photographs, but also old newspaper clippings, music videos, film and early ethnographic images. By assembling real and imagined memories, fantasies, and scenes from everyday life, Gideon Appahconstructs quasi-theatrical compositions that contain an uncertain narrative, stripping them of the signifiers of identity to leave them open to individual interpretation.
“How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights” is an immersive and mesmerizing exhibition that transports the viewer into a mystical and poetic world. With his highly ambitious new paintings that speak to ideas of identity, memory and imagination, Gideon Appah confirms his position as a major contemporary artist. The exhibition runs until April 15, 2023 at the Pace Gallery in London.
