Amoako Boafo reimagines the canon of portraiture, emerging as a key artist in defining the contemporary culture of Africa and the African diaspora. His elegant paintings elevate his subjects, capturing their confidence, style, and character. To depict the figures in his portraits, Boafo manipulates pigment with his fingers rather than with a brush, tracing gestures through direct touch.
Boafo was born in 1984 in Accra, Ghana, where he currently lives and works. After teaching himself to draw and paint as a child, he pursued various professions in his early career, most notably semiprofessional tennis. He graduated from Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra in 2008, winning the college’s award for best portrait painter that year. In 2013, Boafo relocated to Vienna, and with artist and curator Sunanda Mesquita founded WE DEY, a center for exhibitions, workshops, and community programs that advocated for artists of color and LGBTQ+ voices.
Encountering the marginalization of Black people in Austria, Boafo decided to focus on portraits of Black subjects, who remain underrepresented in global contemporary art. Inspired by the expressionistic portraiture of Vienna Secession artists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, he counts among his contemporary influences Jordan Casteel, Maria Lassnig, Kerry James Marshall, and Kehinde Wiley.
Boafo’s self-portraits are autobiographical explorations of his embodied self, expressions of vulnerability and creativity that challenge traditional narratives of masculinity. Other paintings represent men, women, and couples, with subjects chosen from friends and others he admires. They convey individuality and an active presence, with most of the figures locking eyes with the viewer and asserting a strong sense of identity.
Boafo was awarded the Walter Koschatzky Kunstpreis in 2017 and the STRABAG Artaward International in 2019. He completed his MFA at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien in 2019. The same year, he was the artist in residence at the Rubell Museum Miami, with the works completed during his stay comprising the museum’s inaugural one-artist exhibition. Soul of Black Folks, a traveling solo exhibition of over thirty portrait paintings, was organized in 2021–22 by the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco.
Intrigued by fashion as a mode of self-presentation, Boafo collaborated with designer Kim Jones on Dior’s spring/summer 2021 men’s collection. Incorporating the textures and patterns of his portraits, the clothing was advertised entirely with Black models. In August 2021, he completed three paintings on the parachute panels of a Blue Origin rocket that was launched into space and returned to Earth. The first project in Uplift Aerospace’s Art × Space program, Suborbital Triptych included a self-portrait, a painting of Boafo’s mother, and a painting of the mother of fellow artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe.
In December 2022, Boafo opened dot.ateliers, a space intended to strengthen and advance the cultural ecosystem of Accra. Housed in a three-story structure designed by architect David Adjaye, it features a gallery, studios, an art library, and a café, and offers exhibitions and residencies that encourage creative experimentation and support bold expression.
In 2024, Boafo cemented his commitment to Ghana’s cultural ecosystem by also establishing a residency program for writers and curators, dot.ateliers | Ogbojo, in the Greater Accra region. That same year, the Belvedere in Vienna presented Proper Love, the first major European museum exhibition of his work, which celebrated the development of the artist’s aesthetic since his time studying in Vienna.
Amoako Boafo, Photograph by Emma Chang. Courtesy of Gagosian.
