Amoako Boafo (b. 1984, Accra, Ghana) paints the skin of his Black sitters with his bare fingers, working paint directly into the canvas until it registers the same pressure, drag, and irregularity as touch itself, then finishes the surrounding clothing and background with a contrastingly cool, brushed precision that throws the tactile passages into relief.

Boafo trained at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra, graduating in 2008, before moving to Vienna to attend the Academy of Fine Arts, where the paintings of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt sharpened his interest in the expressive possibilities of paint applied directly to skin. He began working with his fingers in 2017, the technique that earned him Austria's Walter Koschatzky Art Award that same year. In 2018, the painter Kehinde Wiley came across Boafo's work on Instagram, acquired several paintings, and introduced him to the Los Angeles gallery Roberts Projects, where Boafo's first U.S. solo exhibition, I See Me, opened in January 2019.