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Amoako Boafo completed his artistic training at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra, Ghana, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Boafo has dedicated himself entirely to portrait painting. In their expressiveness, his pictures recall Egon Schiele. His protagonists seem graceful and elegant, pointing to a central theme of the artist, ‘black experience’. His figures confidently represent the ‘black diaspora’ – proud, present, occupying the space, embedded in colourful fashion apparel. Boafo applies paint mostly with his fingers, simultaneously creating rough and delicate elements that highlight the essence of his sitters and create works with an unmistakable style.1 In 2019 Amoako Boafo received the main prize at the 2019 STRABAG Artaward International and in the same year was also one of the most in-demand artists at the Art Basel Miami Beach. The American artist Kerry James Marshall stated that Afro-American artists had for far too long fled into the abstract ‘in order not to be reduced to their skin colour’. There is a lack of the black body in art history. The answer to this is the current boom in portraits and figurative painting.
Boafo paints his figural portraits in front of colour surfaces and abstract interiors, using oil paint. The faces and hands are created using finger painting, the other parts of the picture with a highly expressive brushstroke – resulting in portraits as powerful as they are sensitive. On this, the artist himself says:
‘Actually I know most of the characters I paint. I am familiar with their forms of expression and their energy. If you look at the portrait, I would like you to know: that is their energy. By painting them, I can connect the colours used with the energy of the people portrayed.’ And: ‘A part of me always gazes at you through my pictures.’2
Through his unique artistic perspective, Amoako Boafo has found international recognition and is now one of the world’s most successful artists.
1 https://www.strabag-kunstforum.at/artcollection/kuenstlerinnen-und-kuenstler/
showartist/429 (24.7.2023)
2 https://www.collectorsagenda.com/de/in-the-studio/amokao-boafo (25.4.2023)