Amoako Boafo

Biography

On 26 August 2021 the uncrewed capsule of a New Shepard rocket rose to a height of about 106 kilometres and returned to Earth. Printed on top of the capsule was Amoako Boafo’s “Suborbital Triptych”: three portraits, showing the artist himself, his mother and a friend’s mother.

The artist was thirty-seven at the time.

Thomas Amoako Boafo was born in 1984 and grew up in Osu, a district of Accra. He studied painting first in Accra, at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design, and then in Vienna, at the Academy of Fine Arts. There, as a graduate student, he was told that his figures were “too black”. He did not stop painting Black people.

His portraits rest on three things: pose, clothing and skin. He models the skin with his fingers, and the technique is instantly recognisable on his canvases. In 2017 he received the jury prize of the Walter Koschatzky Art Prize, and in 2019 the STRABAG Art Award International. That same year he held a residency at the newly opened Rubell Museum in Miami, and in 2020 he worked with Dior on its Spring/Summer 2021 men’s collection. His gallerist Mariane Ibrahim, who specialises in the art of the African diaspora, believes that Boafo has changed the very way a portrait is painted. He is now represented by her gallery in Chicago and by Roberts Projects in Los Angeles. To my mind, the best answer to the Viennese remark about “too black” figures has been those same figures, only now on the walls of major museums.

On 26 May 2022 his debut exhibition in the United States, “Soul of Black Folks”, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and in 2023 it was shown at the Denver Art Museum. Also in 2022 his painting “Sitting on the Sun” (2019) appeared in the group exhibition “Certeza” at the Madrid space of the SOLO collection. In 2024 the Belvedere in Vienna gave him the solo exhibition “Proper Love”, and in 2025 the Gagosian gallery in London showed “I Do Not Come to You by Chance”.

His work is held by the Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Albertina in Vienna, the Rubell Museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, the Aïshti Foundation, the Blenheim Art Foundation and the SOLO collection in Madrid.