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Ghanaian painter Atta Kwami has shown extensively in Europe and Africa, and this strong U.S. debut suggests that local audiences have been missing a great deal.
Kwami takes his inspiration from the visual fabric of Kumasi, Ghana’s second city and his home. This can be hard to divine, even for viewers familiar with the West African nation. Instead, it’s the superficial similarities between his canvases and those of Mary Heilmann and Sean Scully that stand out at first. In Mute (2001), forms slot into each other in ways that recall Scully’s patterning, while three yellow stripes in the center evoke Heilmann’s quirky facture.
But there’s a subtle rhythm to Kwami’s work that renders such comparisons moot. In Harmonium (2001), the play of vertical and horizontal creates complex relationships that recall the facades of cheaply constructed shacks. In other works, the artist angles his forms, exploiting a simple move to realize stunning visual tensions. His opposition of matte and translucent colors and his use of saturated hues add to the spatial push and pull. Kwami’s idiom and interests are far richer than his reference to street shops initially suggests—indicating that painting in Africa is far more sophisticated than most New York gallerygoers realize.
