Amoako Boafo

From Accra to Vienna

Amoako Boafo was born in Accra in 1984. He taught himself to draw and paint as a child and worked in several jobs, among them semi-professional tennis, before studying at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra. In 2014 he moved to Vienna, where he continued his training at the Academy of Fine Arts. He received the Walter Koschatzky Jury Prize in 2017 and the STRABAG Artaward International in 2019, both in Vienna. In Austria he began to paint the Black community around him, partly in response to the racism he encountered and the invisibility of Black people in its museums.

Painting with the fingers

Boafo paints his figures' clothes and backgrounds with a brush, in flat colours and patterns, but models their skin with his fingers, in swirling, sculptural strokes. The contrast gives his sitters a striking physical presence. His subjects are people of the Black diaspora, often friends and fellow artists, painted with dignity, style and directness. The finger-painting technique emerged during his studies in Vienna, when he looked for a more physical and instinctive way of working with the paint.

How to look at a Boafo: start with the skin, since that is where the hands have been, and notice how the strokes follow the shape of a face, a collar or a wrist. Then look at what the brush has done: the clothes and the background are flat and patterned, so the sitter seems to step out of the picture. Dress, pose and gaze are chosen by a painter who often knows the sitter, and that shows. This reading is the site's own.

A rapid rise

The American painter Kehinde Wiley reportedly found Boafo's work on Instagram, and his gallery in Los Angeles, Roberts Projects, added him to its roster and gave him a solo show. His paintings were soon being resold at auction for many times what they had cost, a speculative boom in resale prices. The auction record for his work is Hands Up (2018), which sold at Christie's in Hong Kong on 1 December 2021 for $3.42 million. He has since worked with major galleries and museums. The fashion house Dior made him muse and collaborator for its menswear collection of Spring/Summer 2021 under Kim Jones, who visited his Accra studio and drew on his painting Green Beret; Boafo's friends in Accra modelled the clothes in the collection's film.

Museums and galleries

Soul of Black Folks, his first solo museum exhibition, brought together more than thirty works made between 2016 and 2022. Organised by the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco with the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah, it travelled to Houston in 2022 and to the Seattle Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum in 2023. In 2024 the Belvedere in Vienna presented Proper Love, his first European museum exhibition, with more than fifty works, some shown beside paintings by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. Gagosian represents him: his first show with the gallery opened in New York in March 2023, a selection travelled to Accra in May 2023, and a London show followed in April 2025. In Mexico City, the Mariane Ibrahim gallery showed his first mosaics and stained-glass works in early 2024.

dot.ateliers

In December 2022 he opened dot.ateliers in Accra, in a three-storey building designed by the architect David Adjaye, with a gallery, studios, an art library and a café. In 2024 it added a residency for writers and curators, dot.ateliers | Ogbojo. It is part of a generation of Ghanaian artists investing in institutions at home.

Where to see the work

Dot.ateliers in Accra is the place to see current shows in Ghana, and the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Seattle Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum have shown the touring exhibition. Gagosian and Mariane Ibrahim announce current exhibitions, and auction houses publish catalogues of sales.

See also

Ibrahim Mahama; Njideka Akunyili Crosby; contemporary African art; and our lists of Ghanaian painters and Ghanaian artists.