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.
Boafo's sitters, drawn from his own circle of friends, family, and fellow artists, are typically set against a flat, monochrome ground that isolates them from any narrative context and directs attention instead to clothing, pattern, pose, and above all the sitter's own steady, often direct gaze. The effect is less a statement about identity in the abstract than an insistence on the specific, interior presence of each individual within it, an approach he has extended into fashion collaboration, notably with Dior, without letting the garments overtake the sitter wearing them.
In 2022, Boafo opened dot.ateliers in Accra, a three-story gallery, studio, and residency space designed by the architect David Adjaye; modeled in part on the Studio Museum in Harlem's residency program and on Black Rock, the Dakar residency founded by Wiley, it now hosts a rotating cohort of emerging African artists each year. "I longed for a space where I could express myself creatively," Boafo has said of the project's origins. His work is held in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and has been the subject of institutional exhibitions including Soul of Black Folks, organized jointly by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of the African Diaspora, and a survey at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice.
