Goodman Gallery is delighted to present Dynamic Equilibrium, Atta Kwami’s second solo exhibition with the gallery since announcing representation of the estate in partnership with Beardsmore Gallery. Spanning works made between 1999 and 2020, the exhibition highlights the breadth of Kwami’s singular practice and reaffirms his place as one of the most important African abstract painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Kwami spent the first fifty years of his life in Africa, a period that shaped his artistic vision in lasting ways. Early influences included the kiosks, hand-painted signage and improvised architecture of West African towns – structures whose forms translated into his paintings in ways that always suggested scale, even in the smallest works. These environments, together with Ewe and Asante textile design, jazz, and the tradition of mural painting, offered him a vocabulary of grids, rhythms and chromatic relationships through which he developed a profoundly original language. Whether in architectural structures or textiles, Kwami found vehicles for exploring the expressive and structural potential of colour: blocks and stripes of uneven sizes converge and diverge in patterns that evoke cadence, syncopation and the paradoxical tensions he sought to hold “in a moment”.
The exhibition title draws from a phrase that held deep significance for the artist. In 2014, while visiting Tate Liverpool, Kwami encountered a wall text from the exhibition Mondrian and His Studios. Lacking his notebook, he borrowed his wife Pamela’s sketchbook to copy down a passage describing Mondrian’s notion of “dynamic equilibrium” – a concept that resonated strongly with him.
About Atta Kwami
Atta Kwami (b. 1956, Accra, Ghana, d. 2021, UK) was a distinguished artist, art historian and curator, living and working between the UK and his home country, Ghana. His colourful works of vibrant geometric patterns are inspired by a wide range of influences, from Ewe and Assante cloth to jazz, the tradition of mural painting and the design of street kiosks along the roads of West-African towns. Kwami is known for expanding the notions of painting, basing his practice both in the visual world of his native Ghana and in reflections on modernism.
Atta Kwami studied, and later taught at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). In 2007, Kwami received a PhD in art history, now published as _Kumasi Realism, 1951-2007: An African Modernism, in which he sought to explore past and present influences on West African art, with an emphasis on street art traditions throughout Kumasi, Ghana.
In 2021, the year he died, he was awarded the prestigious Maria Lassnig prize, which recognised later career artists deserving wider career recognition, and, in 2022, The Serpentine unveiled the final public mural commission by Kwami, ‘DzidzƆ kple amenuveve (Joy and Grace)’, which remains on view until September 2024.
This Spring, the Serpentine will publish a monograph about Kwami with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln supported by The Maria Lassnig Foundation and marking the first publication dedicated to examining the breadth of Kwami’s singular practice.
Kwami’s work is included in major collections around the world, including the National Museums of Ghana and Kenya; the V&A Museum, London; the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.
Source: Goodman Gallery
