Amoako Boafo

Born in Accra, Ghana in 1984, Amoako Boafo creates paintings that offer powerful reflections on the diversity and complexity of Black life and activate the power of representation within the classical genre of portraiture. Boafo studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra, Ghana in 2007 and received his MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria, and the artist now splits his time between Vienna, Austria and his hometown of Accra. Negotiating his own experience of diaspora and the cultural complexities of identity and belonging, Boafo offers a tender celebration of his subjects as he captures their intimate subtleties and emotions. Recognizable for their bold colors and patterns, Boafo’s paintings create new ways to portray and approach Blackness and express the vibrancy of everyday life as he addresses themes including community, relationships, and social struggles.

Boafo draws influence from a diverse range of figurative painters, including Egon Schiele, Lynette-Yiadom Boakye, Kehinde Wiley, and Kerry James Marshall. Extending these artists’ forays into the tradition of portraiture by creating beautifully tender portraits of his friends and sitters, Boafo has seen great critical acclaim over the past few years. In the past decade, Boafo starred in recent solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Vienna (2017) and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (2021). Boafo held his first solo exhibition in the United States in 2019 with I See Me at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. Boafo was also the first artist-in-residence at the Rubell Museum in Miami, and is working to create an artist residency and permanent collection in Accra, the first of its kind in his hometown. his works now reside in some of the most prestigious museum collections around the world, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; The Leopold Museum, Vienna; and The Albertina Museum, Vienna.