Artists

Atta Kwami

Press release

Goodman Gallery is delighted to present Atta Kwami’s first solo show with the gallery since announcing representation of the estate in partnership with Beardsmore Gallery. This exhibition presents a selection of important works made over a period of twenty years, showing the breadth of Kwami’s practice and highlighting the artist as one of the most important African abstract painters of the 20th century. Belatedly recognised, Kwami was awarded the prestigious Maria Lassnig prize in 2021 - honouring artists deserving of greater visibility. The prize resulted in a major mural commission at the Serpentine Gallery and the artist’s first monograph which will be published alongside this exhibition.

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.

With a career spanning forty years, Kwami 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 Asante 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. He wrote about how his work was ‘described conventionally as “abstract”’ – but, he explained, ‘given that there is a very precise, knowable set of resources at the back of it, I would describe it rather as schematic: not like a map, but like a reaction to or interpretation of a map […] the outcome of a series of engagements between practices, forms and visual environments that are specific to me in Ghana.’