In Amoako Boafo’s 2020 lithograph Self-Portrait (Yellow), self-portraiture becomes a means of joining personal narrative to broader questions of Black identity, representation, and diaspora. Boafo’s portraits assert the individuality and presence of their subjects while addressing the historical marginalization of Black figures within the Western canon. In this work, the artist turns that representational project upon himself, constructing an image that is at once intimate and public.

Jacques Lacan’s account of the “mirror stage” offers one framework through which to consider this dynamic. For Lacan, recognition of the reflected image contributes to the formation of the ego, establishing a tension between lived experience and the coherent external image through which the self is perceived.1 Self-portraiture intensifies this tension: the artist is simultaneously the observer, the subject observed, and the author of the image presented to others. In Self-Portrait (Yellow), Boafo stages precisely this exchange between interior identity and outward representation.

The saturated yellow ground isolates the figure and heightens the textured modulation of the face. Against this flat, luminous field, Boafo’s features emerge through dense, interlacing marks that resist the smooth conventions historically associated with formal portraiture. The contrast is both visual and conceptual: the background possesses the directness of a sign, while the face records touch, movement, and accumulation. Boafo’s distinctive treatment of skin gives the image its physical intensity. As he has explained, painting with his fingers removes an “instrumental barrier” between himself and his subject, allowing for a more intimate connection and a form of mark-making that he does not believe could be achieved with a brush.2

Boafo’s self-portrait may be placed in a productive dialogue with Egon Schiele’s Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant of 1912. Schiele’s painting belongs to a sustained practice of self-examination in which the body becomes the site of psychological tension and artistic self-construction. His angular contours, compressed pose, and direct gaze resist idealization, presenting identity as unstable, exposed, and deliberately performed. Schiele defended the erotic and bodily dimensions of his work by insisting that human thoughts and feelings belong to nature and therefore remain legitimate subjects of art.3

The comparison does not imply a direct equivalence between the two artists. Schiele’s distorted anatomy emerges from the particular cultural and psychological conditions of early twentieth-century Vienna, while Boafo’s work addresses the position of the Black subject within contemporary European and global visual culture. Nevertheless, both artists use self-portraiture to reject passive likeness. In each case, the face and body are actively constructed through emphatic marks that make the process of representation visible. Where Schiele’s line is brittle, angular, and frequently abrasive, Boafo’s marks are tactile, circular, and layered. Both approaches transform the self-portrait into an encounter with the material act of making.

Andy Warhol’s Self-Portrait with Fright Wig of 1986 offers a different model of artistic identity. Rather than exposing the self through expressive gesture, Warhol converts his appearance into a stark, reproducible emblem. His face emerges theatrically from darkness, while the pale wig functions as both personal attribute and public trademark. The image reflects Warhol’s sustained interest in the ways celebrity, media, and repetition produce identity. His assertion that “if everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is” belongs to this deliberately destabilizing approach to appearance, in which beauty becomes simultaneously democratic, artificial, and inseparable from presentation.4

Warhol’s self-portrait is constructed through distance; Boafo’s is constructed through touch. Yet both artists recognize that public identity is made rather than merely revealed. Warhol’s silkscreened image turns the artist into an icon circulating within mass culture. Boafo’s lithograph similarly acknowledges the public life of the artist’s image, but its textured surface resists the impersonality associated with mechanical reproduction. The force of Self-Portrait (Yellow) lies in this tension between the repeatable medium of lithography and the emphatically tactile language derived from Boafo’s paintings.

Boafo’s years in Vienna further complicate this dialogue. Educated in Accra before studying at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, he developed his mature practice while moving between Ghanaian and European cultural contexts. His work neither simply adopts the traditions of Western portraiture nor positions itself outside them. Instead, it intervenes in those traditions by centering Black subjects as self-possessed individuals whose presence cannot be reduced to sociological type or historical symbol. As Boafo has stated, the central purpose of his practice is “representation, documenting, celebrating, and showing new ways to approach Blackness.”5

This representational project is especially concentrated in self-portraiture. By making himself both subject and author, Boafo assumes control over how the Black figure is seen while acknowledging that identity is formed across multiple cultural, personal, and historical fields. The yellow background does not function merely as decoration. Its chromatic intensity projects the figure forward, while its flatness heightens the complexity of the face. The resulting image asserts visibility without sacrificing interiority.

Self-Portrait (Yellow) therefore belongs to a long history of artists using their own likeness to test the relationship between identity and representation. Schiele transforms the body into an instrument of psychological inquiry; Warhol turns the public image into a mask and commodity; Boafo brings these questions into the contemporary discourse of Black self-representation. His lithograph does not simply record his appearance. It claims space for the artist as a Black subject, maker, and viewer of his own image.

In Boafo’s hands, the self-portrait becomes neither confession nor publicity alone. It is a field in which touch, color, cultural history, and public visibility converge. Through its union of flat chromatic force and intensely worked figuration, Self-Portrait (Yellow) demonstrates the continuing capacity of self-portraiture to examine how identity is embodied, constructed, and seen.