Painted with vibrant color and textured pigments, Amoako Boafo’s After the nail color, 2018, is a stunning example of the artist’s distinctive style of portraiture. Boafo describes his oeuvre as being dedicated to the celebration and documentation of the Black Experience; a topic which the arist feels has otherwise been brashly misrepresented throughout art history. The artist’s championed inaugural series, Black Diaspora, to which the present work belongs, draws from Boafo’s personal experiences as a Ghana native living in Vienna and provides a variegated representation of his friends and acquaintances.
|
Barkley L. Hendricks, Icon for Fifi, 1982. Artwork © Barkley L. Hendricks
|
“My role as an artist is to show alternate perspectives. I want to speak for the people who are unable to speak for themselves.”
Amoako Boafo
|
In After the nail color, a lone female figure bursts out from monochromatic swathes of yellow, Boafo’s signature hue, to display her red-painted fingernails. Her unabashed outward gaze and cheeky pose vivaciously converys the subject’s confidence. Applied with Boafo’s idiosyncratic gestural method, the subject’s luminous skin consists of swirled masses of brown and blue oil paint, creating a texture that elevates her from the uniform backdrop and imbues her with a liveliness radiating from the canvas. Inspired by Austrian painter Egon Schiele, whose technique was similarly gestural, Boafo says “you could really see all the brushstrokes and colors he mixed to make a painting … I just want my paintings to be as free as possible, and Schiele gave me that vibe — the strokes, characters, and composition.”[i]
While bearing stylistic similarities, Boafo’s subjects eschew the psychological torment present in those of his forbearer. Brimming with liveliness through color and texture, the present work is intentionally concise in depiction, focusing exclusively on the individual — her experience as a black woman and the familiar joy of getting a fresh manicure. In works like these, Boafo invites the viewer into the everyday lives of his fellow members of the Diaspora, valiantly reclaiming the representation of black subjects, those whom were largely underrepresented in traditional portraiture of the past.
![](https://phillips.vo.llnwd.net/v1/web_dev/lot-component/image_8115e7bb-4f63-41f6-874e-efba9872d738.png)
The present lot installed at STRABAG Artlounge. Photographed by Eva Kelety. Artwork © Amoako Boafo
|
[i] (Amoako Boafo, quoted in Charles Manning, “Meet Amoako Boafo, the rising artist making his Art Basel Debut”, Daily Front Row, December 9, 2019, online).