Amoako Boafo stars in Belvedere

Boafo's rise in the art world has been nothing short of meteoric. He was born in 1984 in Accra, Ghana, and studied art there from 2004 to 2008. In 2013, he came to Vienna for an exhibition project – and stayed there. He studied here at the Academy of Fine Arts until 2019. In the same year he achieved his achievement. Many exhibitions followed, albeit in the United States. In Europe, the Belvedere in Boafo II's birthplace is now hosting the shooting star's first solo museum show with works from 2016.

There are black people from his circle of friends and acquaintances, and sometimes public figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom the artist usually depicts in large size. There are hardly any classic studio sessions; Boafo often works through photographs or Instagram posts. The images sometimes have an almost serial character due to the similarity in composition, style and design. Often against a monochromatic background, the person being photographed looks at the viewer frontally. The paintings are highly recognizable because Boafo paints faces and other exposed parts of the body using a special finger-painting technique. What looks like a ball of worms when looked at closely looks very dynamic and vibrant from a distance.

“The people depicted seem very confident in themselves. They are neither shy nor arrogant,” museum curator Sergei Harutunyan said at a press conference. “In their individuality, they contrast with those images in white-dominated art history, where dark-skinned people are viewed as Only as types with certain functions or roles, as Rühlig recalls, in Boafo, blackness is celebrated and last but not least, the additional title of the exhibition “Healthy Love” indicates that people of color, equipped with colorful nails and hair accessories or headdresses, radiate joy And lightness.

This is remarkable because the artist faced a lot of rejection in Vienna, especially in his early days, as Haroutunian emphasized. Many galleries have shown inhibitions about displaying “African art.” He advised him to paint white people because it would sell better. But Boafo did not let this discourage him, studying postcolonial theory – in a very early self-portrait he showed himself with Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks – and drawing the conclusion to draw strength from his own identity rather than from his own identity. He always views himself through the lens of the white majority community.

Despite initial difficulties, time in the federal capital greatly influenced Boafo's style. He didn't just discover finger painting here. The Academy's engagement with Viennese Modernism also had an unmistakable influence – in the form of the strict frontal composition of the picture, for example, or through the decorative wallpaper pattern-like elements with which the artist used the special collage technique to decorate large pieces of his characters' clothing. The stylistic similarities become particularly evident by comparing three female portraits by Boafo with two by Klimt from the Belvedere group (“Amalie Zuckerkandl” and “Johanna Studd”).

Insecurity rather than classical masculine postures and displaying his naked and vulnerable body in portraits shows that Boafo also dealt extensively with his schiele. At the end there is an image showing a faceless person against a black background. The sign she holds in her hand says: “Why only paint black people?” According to the curator, the painter was often faced with this question when he was still unknown – and he recommends: “With this question in mind, you should then look at all the pictures again.”

(Service – “Amoako Baofo. Proper Love” at Unteren Belvedere, Vienna 3, Rennweg 6, until January 12, 2025. The bilingual exhibition catalog will be published for € 29.80, at the end of November.)