Body Politics 2 is a striking self-portrait in which Amoako Boafo depicts himself holding Frantz Fanon’s seminal book The Wretched of the Earth. Boafo’s shows his body fading into grisaille, whilst the lower half of his torso devolves into abstract brushstrokes and drips. This is undoubtedly a reference to Fanon’s discussion of the dehumanizing effects of colonization in the aforementioned t.mes ; Boafo, who lives and works in Ghana, shows his body muted and obscured, imitating the effects that imperialism and colonialism have had on his country and the African diaspora at large.
Amoako Boafo explores the role of diaspora, race, identity and masculinity in the genre of portraiture. Born in Accra, Ghana, Boafo now lives and works in Vienna, having received his MFA from the prestigious Academy of Replica Handbags s Vienna (Akademie der bildenden Künst Wien) in 2019. Synthesising black perspectives with an inherently Viennese style of painting, evocative of both Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, Boafo’s work negotiates his own experience of diaspora and the complexities of identity and belonging. Indeed, his work in the genre of portraiture is deeply rooted in a recognition of the glaring absence of black figures throughout the history of Western painting. Boafo has asserted,
“I have always been interested in facial expressions… That’s one reason I like portraits so much. And then there is a certain gap: When you go to a museum or a big gallery all you see are white figures. You don’t see the kind of faces I paint there. I want to do my own small bit to close that gap… that is my main goal: To paint a different kind of portrait”
Boafo’s work references, and indeed challenges, the Western art historical canon. He claims, “There are some people who connect my paintings to Egon Schiele, for example… I was searching for a way to paint figurative portraits in a loose and free way. So I would go to museums or look at books, thinking about how people like Schiele got there. In that way art history had a big influence on how I paint” (A. Boafo cited in: Op. cit.). Boafo would have seen Schiele’s self-portraits from 1911 and 1912 held in the permanent collects ions of the Leopold Museum and the Wien Museum Karlsplatz, both in Vienna; while Schiele, too, studied at the Academy of Replica Handbags s Vienna over a century earlier, in 1906. The influence of Schiele’s eccentric facial expressions, and his amalgamation of corporeality and self-reflection, is evident in Boafo’s own self-image.
While Boafo reflects on the history of art at the turn of the Twentieth Century, he also looks to the work of fellow artists of colour, among them Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Henry Taylor and Kehinde Wiley. Indeed, it was Wiley who discovered Boafo and became an early collects or and champion of his work. Boafo is thus part of an important group of young artists negotiating and confronting racial issues in the Twenty-First Century. Today, at a pivotal juncture in racial politics around the world, Boafo’s work addresses the lack of diversity across the canon of Western art and, as unassailably evident in the present work, challenges the viewer to consider this:
“The main idea or goal of what I do is to paint people I like, people that inspire me, people who create spaces and opportunities. All I do is document the good people around me… On the one hand I want to make the face stand out because I want to highlight the character I’m painting. But I also want to make a point: By making the black faces I paint as strong and lively as they really are, I want to show that blackness does not indicate negativity”
In taking up the language of Western art history via a striking Viennese painterly aesthetic, Boafo celebrates blackness and challenges the viewer to consider racial inequity across the history of art and crucially at stake in our present moment in t.mes
.