Atonsu Agogo

Atta Kwami, who died in October 2021, was one of West Africa’s leading abstract artists. Born in Ghana, Kwami lived between Kumasi, Ghana and Loughborough, England: his mother, Grace Kwami, was an accomplished modernist sculptor. Although belonging to the same universe of hard-edge abstraction as Malevich, Mondrian and Ellsworth Kelly, Kwami drew upon the vernacular architecture, textiles and art forms of West Africa with a somewhat softer, more organic approach to his work. His ideas are laid out in his treatise Kumasi Realism 1951-2007: An African Modernism (2011) which outlines his syntheses of influences, ‘Western and African, academic and of the street’. This monograph grew from his PhD studies from the Open University. Alongside his paintings, Kwami also showed architectural work, often small painted huts or kiosks that referred to the hastily built, informal and painted structures which proliferate across Ghana.
Kwami’s work is held in major collections including national museums of Kenya and Ghana; the National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum, New York; the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2001 he was the subject of a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel. In 2021, Kwami was awarded the Maria Lassnig Prize in partnership with the Serpentine Galleries, where his project takes the form of a comprehensive monograph publication and public mural commission, both unveiled in summer 2022.