Amoako Boafo
Black Frames, 2024
Oil and paper transfer on canvas, 78 ⅝ × 98 ⅜ inches (199.7 × 249.9 cm)
© Amoako Boafo. Photo: Owen Conway
Amoako Boafo
NY Neighborhood, 2023
Oil and paper transfer on canvas, 80 ⅜ × 86 ¾ inches (204.2 × 220.3 cm)
© Amoako Boafo. Photo: Maris Hutchinson
Amoako Boafo
Parted Lips, 2022
Oil on canvas, 80 × 69 ⅞ inches (203 × 177.5 cm)
© Amoako Boafo. Photo: Martin Wong
Amoako Boafo
Brides Reflection, 2021
Oil on canvas, 78 × 66 inches (198.1 × 167.6 cm)
© Amoako Boafo. Photo: Rob McKeever
The primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating, and showing new ways to approach Blackness.
—Amoako Boafo
Amoako Boafo reimagines the canon of portraiture, emerging as a key artist in defining the contemporary culture of Africa and the African diaspora. His elegant paintings elevate his subjects, capturing their confidence, style, and character. To depict the figures in his portraits, Boafo manipulates pigment with his fingers rather than with a brush, tracing gestures through direct touch.
Boafo was born in 1984 in Accra, Ghana, where he currently lives and works. After teaching himself to draw and paint as a child, he pursued various professions in his early career, most notably semiprofessional tennis. He graduated from Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra in 2008, winning the college’s award for best portrait painter that year. In 2013, Boafo relocated to Vienna, and with artist and curator Sunanda Mesquita founded WE DEY, a center for exhibitions, workshops, and community programs that advocated for artists of color and LGBTQ+ voices.
Encountering the marginalization of Black people in Austria, Boafo decided to focus on portraits of Black subjects, who remain underrepresented in global contemporary art. Inspired by the expressionistic portraiture of Vienna Secession artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, he counts among his contemporary influences Jordan Casteel, Maria Lassnig, Kerry James Marshall, and Kehinde Wiley.
Join exhibition curator Donna De Salvo as she discusses her selection of the artist’s rarely seen sculptures, drawings, films, and archival materials in Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience at Gagosian, Le Bourget. Chief among these is Truck Trilogy (2011–17), De Maria’s final sculpture and the centerpiece of the exhibition.
The Fall 2025 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Andy Warhol’s Blue Liz as Cleopatra (1962) on the cover.
Join Glenn Brown in his London studio as he discusses his presentation for the Studio section of Frieze Masters 2025, which explores the idea of the artist’s studio as a time machine: a space in which historical memory fuels creativity, manifesting in artworks that look to the future. Brown speaks about the featured works, which range from new paintings, drawings, and a sculpture to historic works on paper from the Brown Collection.
On the eve of ECHOES FROM COPELAND, an exhibition of new paintings at Gagosian, New York, Nathaniel Mary Quinn met with Ashley Stewart Rödder to discuss the genesis of the works he’s been creating, their literary origins, and his evolving approach to the practices—and intersections—of painting and drawing.
Jordan Carter, curator and cohead of the curatorial department at Dia Art Foundation, New York, engages with the new artist’s book Cady Noland: Polaroids 1986–2024.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas spoke with artist, writer, and podcaster Joshua Citarella inside Kulendran Thomas’s exhibition Peace Core at Gagosian, Park & 75, New York. The pair discussed the makings and meanings of the exhibition, which juxtaposed a video work of infinite duration that continually remixes and reedits American television footage from the morning of September 11, 2001, with six expressionistic paintings based on AI-generated images depicting a largely undocumented massacre in Sri Lanka in 2009, perpetrated in the wake of the “war on terror.”
Ahead of her exhibition over the summer at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Jenny Saville met with the novelist Douglas Stuart to discuss Glasgow, the beauty and blemishes of bodies, and their respective creative processes.
Maximiliane Leuschner speaks with South Africa’s most-sought-after emerging choreographer, Mthuthuzeli November.
Carlos Valladares tracks the artist’s engagements with Hollywood glamour, thinking through the ways in which the star system and its marketing engine informed his work.
The celebrated New York School poet and Pulitzer Prize–winner James Schuyler is the subject of Nathan Kernan’s new biography, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler. Kernan narrates the wild turns in the poet’s life with great skill, from his peripatetic youth, through his years in the influential circle of W. H. Auden, on to his critical friendships with poets and artists such as John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, Frank O’Hara, and Fairfield Porter. Here Raymond Foye, a friend of Schuyler’s (and the poet’s literary executor), talks with Kernan about the genesis of the project and some of the breakthroughs and challenges he encountered in its construction.
In this ongoing series the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the third installment of 2025, we are honored to present Marina Tabassum, the architect behind this year’s Serpentine Pavilion in London, A Capsule in Time.
The third installment of a short story by Catherine Lacey.
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