Amoako Boafo

Amoako Boafo (born in 1984 in Accra, Ghana, lives and works in Austria, Vienna) uses painting to create his enticing characters and honor Black figures’ place into the pictorial tradition of the Portrait. He is regarded as a notable young voice in art of the African Diaspora through his new approaches to the shaping of Black forms, and their dispositions in a larger global context. Boafo’s portraits are enticing in their lucidity. The brushstrokes are thick and gestural, the contours of the body almost soften into abstraction. Accentuated and elevated figures are often isolated on single color backgrounds, their gaze the focal point, to disrupt observations from canonical viewership. The poses are serene and the skin luminous, his tableaux-vivants place the figures at a higher recognition, both physically in regards to the size and spiritually in terms of their grandeur. Boafo studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (Austria). In 2017, he was awarded with the jury prize, Walter Koschatzky Art Prize.