About the artists

Gideon Appah (b. 1987, Ghana. Lives and works in Accra)

Gideon Appah draws on childhood memories and dreams, as well as West African landscapes and popular culture for his dazzling, bold, and jewel-toned paintings. As a child, Appah’s first medium was charcoal, which his grandmother used to cook meals at home. His early works are an ode to his hometown of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and incorporate images associated with daily life such as lottery numbers and other symbols present in the social and economic fabric of the city. Appah’s work investigates his childhood as well as local mythologies, ethereal landscapes, rivers, domestic interiors, and recurring figures both imagined and known, such as his grandmother and brother.

The artist often paints in tones of royal blue, crimson, dark orange, and white over found and collaged posters, prints, photographs, and film stills, many of these centering on occupations his family members have held within their community such as barber and tailor shops. Mixing photographic images with paint, Appah employs a process of priming the canvas and sketching the composition before transferring prints from paper onto the canvas using a mixture of glue and water. After the canvas dries, he carves out the images, making them visible before applying paint. Most recently, the artist has utilised oil paint, working in a more flattened perspective and using a rich palette to condense impasto brushstrokes. Appah creates dream-like worlds through a fauvist lens, examining personal and homeland histories such as Ghanaian postcolonial cinema, leisure culture, and nightlife, using newspaper clippings from the 1950s through the 80s as source material.

Gideon Appah received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana in 2012. In 2015, he was chosen as one of the top ten finalists for the Kuenyehia Art Prize for Contemporary Ghanaian Arts. That same year he became the first international artist to win the 1st Merit Prize Award at the Barclays L’Atelier Art Competition, which was held in Johannesburg. This awarded him a three-month artist residency at the Bag Factory Studios and a solo show at the Absa Gallery, both in Johannesburg, South Africa. Solo exhibitions include How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights, Pace Gallery, London, UK (2023); More Luck, Mitchell Innes and Nash, New York, NY, USA (2022); Gideon Appah: Forgotten, Nudes, Landscapes, Institute for Contemporary Art at University of Commonwealth Virginia, Richmond, USA (2022); Blue Boys Blues, Mitchell Innis & Nash, New York, USA (2020); Love Letters, Gallery 1957, Accra, Ghana (2019); In Pokua's Place, Nubuke Foundation, Accra, Ghana (2017); Between a life and its dream, ABSA Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa (2017); and Sensation, Goethe Institute, Accra, Ghana (2023). Group exhibitions span Ghana, South Africa, New York, London, Mexico and Germany. His work is held in public collections worldwide including Absa Museum, Johannesburg; Musée d'Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden, Marrakesh, Morocco; and Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada.

Amoako Boafo (b. 1984, Ghana. Lives and works in Accra)

Amoako Boafo uses painting to create his enticing characters and honour Black figures’ place into the pictorial tradition of the Portrait. He is regarded as a notable young voice in art of the African Diaspora through his new approaches to the shaping of Black forms, and their dispositions in a larger global context. Boafo’s portraits are enticing in their lucidity. The brushstrokes are thick and gestural, the contours of the body almost soften into abstraction. Accentuated and elevated figures are often isolated on single colour backgrounds, their gaze the focal point, to disrupt observations from canonical viewership. The poses are serene and the skin luminous, his tableaux-vivants place the figures at a higher recognition, both physically in regard to the size and spiritually in terms of their grandeur. Boafo studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (Austria). In 2017, he was awarded with the jury prize, Walter Koschatzky Art Prize.

Widely collected by private and public collectors and institutions, most recently by the Leopold Museum (Vienna, Austria), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New-York, NY), Marieluise Hessel Collection Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-On-Hudson, NY), Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (Annandale-On-Hudson, NY), The Albertina Museum Vienna (Austria), and the Rubell Museum (Miami, FL). His work has been exhibited in Europe and in the United-States in institutions such as Gagosian (New York, USA), the Volkskunde Museum (Vienna, Austria), Kunsthalle Vienna (Vienna, Austria), Mumok (Vienna Austria), The Bass Museum (Miami, FL) among others.

Kwesi Botchway (b. 1995, Ghana. Lives and works in Accra)

Kwesi Botchway is inspired by artistic representations of Black beauty, joy, and futurity. Botchway locates himself firmly in the Black Art genealogy, using his work to respond to anti-Blackness as experienced by Africans as well as those in far-flung African diasporas. Resonant across his work is the mission to represent Blackness beyond the limits of dominant narratives, representing its loveliness, vitality, and expansiveness. Botchway works within the portrait tradition that bears a storied legacy in western art, reworking it by centering the long-absent and ignored Black figure. Blending styles of French Impressionism and African Realism, Botchway transforms the portrait into a study not of fixedness of identity, but of becoming and possibility. This oeuvre marks a shift from his earlier works, which sit more squarely in the realist style and are heavily influenced by Ghanian street art traditions. Realism and abstraction also influence the artist’s process of choosing subjects - while many are those Botchway knows from his life, others spring from his imagination or are composites of features he gleans from the world around him.

Kwesi Botchway is the Founder of WorldFaze Art Studio in Accra, a studio and residency space focusing on supporting young local artists. This support for emerging talent is deeply inflected by his own introduction to painting through apprenticing with a Ghanian street artist at a young age. He studied art at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra before enrolling at the Academy of Visual Arts in Frankfurt, Germany. He has held solo exhibitions in Denmark, Ghana, the UK, and Belgium, some resulting from his residency at Gallery 1957 in Ghana in 2020. Group exhibitions have featured his work across Ghana, South Africa, the UK, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, while he has been exhibited at fairs such as Art Brussel Week in 2021. Botchway was nominated for the GUBA Awards USA as an Influential Artist in 2019, and has received significant press attention, profiled by publications such as Vogue, Financial Times, Flash Art, The Art Newspaper, Stylist, ArtNews, and Frieze.

Joana Choumali (b. 1974, Côte d'Ivoire. Lives and works in Abidjan)

Joana Choumali is a visual artist and photographer whose work in conceptual portraits, mixed media and documentary photography portrays scenes from life in Côte d'Ivoire and across Africa. Much of her work focuses on what she learns about the innumerable cultures around her. Choumali has exhibited her work around the world, namely: Gallery 1957 (Ghana); Beurs Van Berlage (the Netherlands); 50 Golborne Gallery (UK), and Sperone Westwater (USA). Group exhibitions have borne her work at the Royal Academy of Arts (UK); Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (Morocco); Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (South Africa); the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle (France); Daikanyama Hillside Forum (Japan), the Mouravieff-Apostol House & Museum (Russia), as well as venues in Zurich, Shanghai, Dublin, Monaco, and Milan.

In 2019 the artist was awarded the Prix Pictet, becoming the first African and second woman to be awarded this prestige. In 2017, she exhibited her series Translation and Adorn at the Pavilion of the Côte d'Ivoire during the 57th Venice International Biennale. In 2016, she was awarded the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund and the Fourthwall Books Award in South Africa. In 2014, she won the CapPrize Award and the Emerging Photographer LensCulture Award. In 2020, Choumali was named the Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography by The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in the United States.

Tegene Kunbi (b. 1980, Ethiopia. Lives and works in Berlin)

Tegene Kunbi completed a Painting and Art Education degree at the Fine Arts School, University of Addis Ababa, in 2004. With the help of the prestigious DAAD scholarship, he left Ethiopia in 2008 to study at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts Degree in 2011. The artist considers colour as a vocabulary to give voice to aspects of his heritage. Kunbi creates compositions of different geometric shapes, colours, landscape and fabrics to create surfaces of vibrant textures and layers. Each hue is a conversation with the next, producing a sense of harmony and tension. Tonality, density and the rectilinear grid are also an integral part of the work. Through this language he conveys the dynamism and complexities within personal experience and that of his community.

Selected solo exhibitions include Don't Talk, Bode Project, Berlin, Germany (2023); Tegene Kunbi, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, Germany (2023);Warp and Weft, Primo Marella Gallery (2022); Danjerus Cable, Galerie Gerken, Berlin, Germany (2015); Melting Pot, Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York, NY, USA (2014) and Tegene Kunbi, Galerie Gerken, Berlin, Germany (2014).Selected group exhibitions include Unlimited, Gallery 1957, Accra, Ghana (2022);Dissonance, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2022); From Modern to Contemporary: Artists from the Horn of Africa and Diaspora, CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm, Sweden (2021);Here History Began Tracing the Re/Verberations of Halim El-Dabh, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Germany (2021); Matièressensibles ‘Of materials and things’, La Condition Publique, Roubaix, France (2021); Tegene Kunbi and Saleh Lô: Abstract // Figures, ArtGallé Amy Sow, Nouakchott, Mauritania (2021);Summer Exhibition, Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York, NY, USA (2020);Planet B, BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt, Berlin, Germany (2020);Material Color, Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York, NY, USA (2019);RE:PUBLIC, with Robel Temesgen, Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, Kenya (2019);Light Years: Celebrating20Years of Margaret Thatcher Projects, Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York, NY, USA (2018) and Best of Galerie Gerken, Galerie Gerken, Berlin, Germany (2018).The artist has participated in the following fairs: Artgenève, 1-54, Dak’Art Biennale, Planet Art Festival and PULSE Miami Beach. In 2022, the artist was named the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor at Dak’Art Biennale 2022 winner.

Kaloki Nyamai (b.1985 in Kitui, Kenya)

Drawing heavily on the stories of the Kamba people his grandmother recounted, Nyamai explores how identity and the perception of the self is inflected by the past, present, and future. He works with multiple media, layering each work with rich textures that reveal various figures and abstract forms. These representations present an alternative to the flat, one-dimensional identities that are the legacy of colonialism. Nyamai turns to these textured, layered interpretations of the self and time as an antidote to the singular narrative of History that is taught as the definitive account of Kenya and its people. These works speak to daily life, past events, what justice has come to mean, and the political fault lines of postcolonial Kenya. Commenting on his own lived experience or stories that he has been entrusted with, Nyamai sees his work as part of a lineage of storytelling his grandmother and other ancestors practiced, passing on tales from one generation to another to produce an understanding of history that is complex, plural, and contradictory. His art often depicts fragments of forms that must be pieced together slowly. The viewer is called on to search through and make connections between forms, which mimics the artist’s creative process as well as how one would sift through and make meaning of the many histories storytelling produces.

Turiya Magadlela (b. 1978, Soweto, South Africa)Turiya Magadlela studied at the Funda Art Academy under Charles Nkosi, the University of Johannesburg and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Magadlela works with art-making techniques that are traditionally used by women, using sewing, embroidery and the manipulation of textiles that are loaded with societal and cultural significance. Magadlela examines the contemporary feminine experience through her powerful compositions in fabrics ranging from pantyhose and prison uniforms to bed linens and sheeting. Magadlela’s subject matter moves between articulations of personal experience of woman- and motherhood, and narratives from Black South African history. Her work engages the viewer in a conversation centred around the historical female figure; using a unique mix of historically charged materials to express themes that are often taboo in nature. Eroticism, sexual abuse and gender discrimination all feature in Magadlela’s various bodies of work. Magadlela has held numerous solo exhibitions at galleries, art fairs and institutions including the Armory Show in New York (2017). She has participated in several group exhibitions, both locally and internationally ‘Ubuntu, a Lucid Dream’ curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi (Palais de Tokyo,2021); ‘Blue Black’ curated by Glenn Ligon (Pulitzer Arts Foundation,2017); ‘Simple Passion, Complex Vision: The Darryl Atwell Collection’(Gantt Centre, 2017), ‘The Past is Present’ (Jack Shainman Gallery, 2017),‘Les jour qui vient’ curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi (Galerie des Galeries,2017); and ‘Blackness in Abstraction’ (Pace Gallery, 2016). In 2015, she was awarded the prestigious FNB Art Prize, and in 2018, was a finalist for the Jean-François Prat Prize. Magadlela artwork has been collected by numerous collections including the University of Cape Town (UCT) Works of Art Collection; Tiroche De Leon Collection; The Bredin Prat Foundation; The Pulitzer Arts Foundation; and The Good Hope Trust Art Collection.

Nadia Waheed (b. 1992, Saudi Arabia. Lives and works in Texas)

The multiplicity to Nadia Waheed’s art reflects the various locations of her upbringing, from her birth in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents to her experience living in France, Egypt, Pakistan, and finally the United States. Waheed’s work is both allegorical and autobiographical at once. Her large-scale figurative paintings seamlessly reference both her own lived experience as well as broader themes of womanhood, cultural trauma, and the desire for selfhood unfettered by conventions, expectations, and obligations. The female subjects in her work, often self-portraits, clearly bear the weight of the, oftentimes contradictory, cultural pressures that fall on women. They also demonstrate a quiet interiority or interrelationships with other women that gesture towards a liberated self unbeholden to social norms and compulsions.

Waheed is currently included in the group show Disembodied, Nicodim Gallery, New York, USA (2023). Selected group shows include, Madeleine Bialke, M. Florine Démosthène, Sahara Longe, Nadia Waheed, Alexander Berggruen, New York, New York, USA (2022); Wonder Women II, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2022); YOU ME ME YOU, Nicodim, Los Angeles, USA (2022); Pop up @ Frieze Korea, Harper’s Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2022); The Storytellers, Gallery 1957, London, UK (2022); Wonder Women, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York, USA (2022); I is the Other, Lyles and King, New York, USA (2022); Note From the Motherland, Aicon Gallery, New York, USA (2021); Sweet Jane in Fields of Daisies, Phillips, New York, USA (2021); The Scenic Route, 1969 Gallery, New York, USA (2021); She Came to Stay, Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome, Italy (2021); This Sacred Vessel Online, Arsenal Contemporary, New York, USA (2020); Sacred Vessel (pt.2), Arsenal Contemporary, New York, USA (2020); Crossroads, Patel Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2020); Moleskine Show @ POW!WOW!, Spoke Art, Honolulu, Hawaii (2020); Lady Parts, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, USA (2020); Lately, Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco, USA (2020); While Supplies Last, Bellevue Arts Museum, Seattle, USA (2019); Night & Day, Thierry Goldberg, New York, USA (2019); I ♡ Paint, Patel Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2019); Selfie Gauntlet, The Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, USA (2018); Hear Me Out, ARC Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2017); Closing Party, The Space, Sydney, Australia (2017); Cubicle the Musical, S. Dearborn Gallery Space, Chicago, USA (2015); Advanced Pain, Crybaby Gallery, Chicago, USA (2015); Spring Show, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, USA (2015). The artist has been featured in a number of fairs and talks, such as NADA Fair Online, SoHo Beach House and The New Museum.

Solo exhibitions include Heavy Bend, Gallery 1957, London, UK (2022); Am I Human Yet?, Arsenal Contemporary Art, New York, USA (2021); I Climb, I Backtrack, I Float, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL, USA (2020); For the Few and the Many, BEERS London, London, UK (2019); See Me Where I Am, The Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX, USA (2019); Notes From A Windowless Room, Raw Paw Gallery, Austin, TX, USA (2019) and Eight Chicks in a Pod, Bolm Studios, Austin, TX, USA (2018).

Frieze Seoul 2023

GALLERY 1957 | BOOTH a8september 6TH - 9TH

GALLERY 1957 | BOOTH a8
september 6TH - 9TH