Amoako Boafo: Creating space to celebrate Blackness

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo has attracted global fame for his bold and sensual portraits. He paints bodies and faces using his fingertips instead of a brush, capturing form through direct, tactile gestures. When he went to art school in Vienna, he was struck by the extent to which Black subjects had been overlooked in global art. Determined to change the status quo, he drew inspiration from early 20th Century Viennese artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and added his own techniques to invent a fresh new style of portraiture. Lucy Ash follows his preparations for a major new show at Gagosian in London. It involves a transformation of the gallery space into a full-scale recreation of a Ghanaian courtyard – just like the shared space in which he was raised. With the help of his collaborator, Glenn De Roché, an architect famous for community buildings and with an artist friend who produced a set of playing cards, especially for the event. This episode of The Documentary, comes to you from In the Studio, exploring the processes of the world’s most creative people.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Makub Wafo.
0:07.0	We are in Akra, Ghana.
0:11.0	Osu, to be precise, which is where I have my studio.
0:15.0	I have tropical plants. I have cactus because I like how resilient that plant is.
0:25.6	I have also mango, purple.
0:28.6	I have pear, coconut.
0:31.6	It's a lot.
0:45.3	Once you get inside, it is very old architecture, very high ceilings, really nice tarasu walk tiles.
0:55.6	I'm Lucy Ash. This is the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service. Today I'm exploring the celebration of black identity by the Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafu.
0:59.3	My studio, I would say, is my identity.
1:04.5	It's not just a painting studio,
1:06.2	it's also a space that house is part of my collection
1:09.4	because I also collect as an artist.
1:11.8	I feel it's important to give back the way I have received.
1:17.7	Amoako has received plenty of attention over the last few years.
1:22.8	Art critics talk about his meteoric rise, a cliche.
1:27.0	But then he did decorate a rocket for the Amazon founder
1:30.3	and billionaire Jeff Bezos, and he's caught the eye of many other wealthy art collectors.
1:36.0	In this edition of In the Studio, I'm following Amoako as he prepares for his first London show.
1:43.3	The centrepiece will be a recreation of the Accra courtyard in which he grew up.
1:48.5	It's a common feature for homes in Ghana,
1:51.1	and it's a space traditionally dominated by women.
	...

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