“The primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating and showing new ways to approach Blackness.”
—Amoako Boafo

Powerfully chromatic and lyrically rendered, Pink Shorts is a monumental example of Amoako Boafo’s groundbreaking contemporary figurative practice. Deceptively complex in form and structure, the present work depicts a young man sat at ease in the centre of the composition, arms folded and legs apart, gazing directly out at the viewer as if in conversation. Different shades of pastel pink are deployed to delineate the form of the background, the sitter’s shirt and the eponymous pink shorts. Flat and single-toned, these areas contrast vividly with Boafo’s electric rendering of his sitter’s skin, teeth, eyes and hair. Here, he deploys swirling, unblended and seemingly spontaneous strokes, applying pigment with his fingers rather than a brush: ‘The lack of control I have with using my fingers is organic… I love that this seemingly simple motion can generate such an intense energy and create almost sculptural figures’.ⁱ Complexion and expression dissolve almost into abstraction through the artist’s atypical process of mark-making, in turn imparting a shimmering, dynamic chromaticism. Relying on his intuition in determining his use of colour, Boafo considers his relationship with colour similar to a poet’s with words or a musician’s with sound: ‘It’s just organic and, most of the time, I just get it right’.ⁱⁱ A hallmark of his practice, he expresses lush colour in a manner beyond the ability of the brush, and the vibrant blue, grey and mauve underpainting seamlessly integrated into his subject’s flesh creates depth and subtle patterning.

 

Like Amy Sherald who paints in grisaille, Boafo complicates the literally superficial appearance of Blackness through his complex, fluid treatment of surface. In this sense, his technique ‘not only belies the literalness of the designation ‘black’ but also makes the figures pulse with energy. Despite their static poses, they seem ever shifting and unfixed’.ⁱⁱⁱ This painterly fluidity is rooted in the complex diasporic notion of identity, constantly negotiated and compromised. On a broader level, the centring of the Black figure is a key aspect of his practice, aligning him with other artists of the African diaspora such as Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Henry Taylor and Kehinde Wiley. Exclusively depicting members of the African and African diaspora, Boafo prefers to paint people with a connection to himself: ‘I choose characters I also want to identify myself with. The colors, the energy, the patterns, the expressions – that’s them, but then I always add something of myself too’.^iv In this sense, his ongoing portrait practice generates and sustains a strong sense of community, both in drawing on his intimate circle of friends as cast members within his visual world and by evincing multiple modes and models of Black creativity.

“The direct gaze in my paintings makes this person look back at you. You stare at the painting and someone stares back at you. That might not be very comfortable for you. It's not easy to be stared at because it means when you’re analyzing the painting, the painting is analyzing you at the same time. It's give and take.”
—Amoako Boafo

Born and raised in Accra, Ghana, where he studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design, Boafo moved to Vienna in 2014 to pursue an MFA at the Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der bildenden Künst Wien), where he studied until 2019. Here, in searching for a way to render figurative portraits in a loose and free manner, he began to synthesise a specifically Black perspective and subject matter with an inherently Viennese style of painting, reminiscent of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. Their influence can be felt in the over- and underlapping planes of colour in Pink Shorts, delineated through contoured ridges of pigment, and the sitter’s unusual facial expression. In another way, Boafo’s amalgamation of gestural corporeality and self-reflection is particularly reminiscent of Schiele’s portraits which unsettle through an intensity of gaze and draughtsmanship. As the artist has stated, ‘I use painting as an instrument to navigate the complexities of human experiences and to depict a sense of each subject’s presence in the world. I place my subjects at a higher recognition, in size and in terms of their gaze at the audience. Each gaze in my subjects functions to disrupt viewership. I want to bring to light sentiments of how Black people are constructing identity’.^v This element of self-determination, as demonstrated so powerfully in Pink Shorts, is key to Boafo’s expressively figurative practice, marking him out as one of the leading voices within global contemporary art today.

 

 Collector’s Digest

 

• Examples of Boafo’s work are held in the permanent collections of prestigious international institutions including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Albertina Museum in Vienna, where the artist currently resides.

 

 

ⁱ Amoako Boafo, quoted in Dean Kissick, ‘Figurative Painter Amoako Boafo on his Stratospheric Rise’, GQ, 29 January 2021, online.

ⁱⁱ Amoako Boafo, quoted in Victoria L. Valentine, ‘Culture Talk: Amoako Boafo’s First Exhibition at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles Centers Black Subjectivity’, Culture Type, 15 February 2019, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Sharon Mizota, ‘In Amoako Boafo’s portraits, every brushstroke of every black face matters’, The Los Angeles Times, 20 February 2019, online.

^iv Amoako Boafo, quoted in Gabriel Roland, ‘In the Studio: Amoako Boafo’, Collector’s Agenda, 2019, online

^v Amoako Boafo, quoted in Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, ‘Amoako Boafo by Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’, Bomb Magazine, 26 August 2020, online.