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Lot Essay
Towering larger than life-size, Amoako Boafo’s Untitled (Standing Nude) (2015), is a monumental self-portrait layered with thought and feeling. Boafo has painted himself with fine, sculptural realism; sheens and shadows of peacock blue spark across his skin like electricity. He furrows his brow as he reads a book. Further copies hover across the canvas, held by multiple, overlaid figures that duplicate the artist’s body in grisaille; these silhouettes are interlaced with deft sketches of hands and feet, echoing the superimposed motion and posture studies of the Renaissance. Their dilute greys and blues rain tracks down the canvas. The book is The Wretched of the Earth, by the psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from France—and first published in English in 1963—this landmark text examines the psychological effects of colonisation upon both individuals and nations, and has become a touchstone for civil rights activists and Black consciousness movements around the world. Quotes from the foreword to Boafo’s edition float next to the artist in blue. They include adapted lines from Simone de Beauvoir, who writes: ‘… [Fanon] gave an explanation of his egocentricity: a member of a colonised people must be constantly aware of his position, his image; he is being threatened from all sides; impossible to forget for an instant the need to keep up one’s defences’ (S. de Beauvoir, quoted in H. K. Bhabha, ‘Foreword: Framing Fanon’, in The Wretched of the Earth, New York 2004, p. vii). Against the diaphanous forms around him, Boafo’s own image—and Fanon’s book—emerge as bold, incontrovertible presences.
The present work was painted just one year after Boafo—born in Accra, Ghana, in 1984—moved to Vienna to study at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. While the bold figuration of Viennese modernists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele can be vividly felt in his work, the rich depictions of Black experience found in the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel and Kehinde Wiley were also formatively influential. ‘The communities I identify with’, Boafo says, ‘are the African diaspora in all its forms.’ Taking himself and those close to him as his subjects, he explores painting as a space for Black joy and self-expression. ‘The subjects of my works and the composition of their presence in my paintings’, he explains, ‘put forward definitive sentiments of how Black people are not only constructing their own identities, but celebrating them’ (A. Boafo, quoted in D. Kissick, ‘Figurative painter Amoako Boafo on his stratospheric rise’, GQ Magazine, 29 January 2021). In the present work, surrounded by ghostly alternate versions of himself, Boafo’s proud self-presentation—an elegant choreography of body, text and intellect—stands tall.
The present work was painted just one year after Boafo—born in Accra, Ghana, in 1984—moved to Vienna to study at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. While the bold figuration of Viennese modernists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele can be vividly felt in his work, the rich depictions of Black experience found in the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Kerry James Marshall, Jordan Casteel and Kehinde Wiley were also formatively influential. ‘The communities I identify with’, Boafo says, ‘are the African diaspora in all its forms.’ Taking himself and those close to him as his subjects, he explores painting as a space for Black joy and self-expression. ‘The subjects of my works and the composition of their presence in my paintings’, he explains, ‘put forward definitive sentiments of how Black people are not only constructing their own identities, but celebrating them’ (A. Boafo, quoted in D. Kissick, ‘Figurative painter Amoako Boafo on his stratospheric rise’, GQ Magazine, 29 January 2021). In the present work, surrounded by ghostly alternate versions of himself, Boafo’s proud self-presentation—an elegant choreography of body, text and intellect—stands tall.