Amoako Boafo, Laced Fingers, 2022
03 June 2025
Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo studied painting in Accra and Vienna, two cities that would become a microcosm of his rich, nuanced artistic world. His tender portraits have quickly become some of the most important representations of Africa and the African diaspora of the 21st century. They borrow from sources ranging from children’s paintings to the work of 19th century Vienna Secessionists such as Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, and Koloman Moser. In Laced Fingers (2022), we see a crystallisation of Boafo’s unique treatment of his subjects that rejects binaries that have for so long defined portraiture. It is at once naive and deeply accomplished, bold and sensitive, quiet and unapologetic. In traversing these boundaries, Boafo sets out a new and ingenious proposition for what figurative painting might be.
In it, we see Boafo eschew the paintbrush in favour of his characteristic finger-painting technique, a method of rendering his subject with a distinct sense of immediacy and embodied knowledge. For their part, the figure looks out at the viewer from an empty backdrop. Their wrists limp and their hands clasped together, they seem neither disinterested nor particularly stimulated; they exist, it seems, on their own terms, defying the expectations of portrait subjects that hundreds of years of art history have inferred upon us.
Within Boafo’s roughly-rendered strokes, the artist reveals a wealth of emotion that lingers just under the surface of the skin. “I love that this seemingly simple motion can generate such intense energy and unveil these sculptural figures by the pattern the form of the skin reflects,” the artist says, “the lack of control I have with using my fingers is organic, and that shows through in the abstract forms that create the beautiful faces of my subjects.”
Indeed, it is such use of pattern within figuration that links Boafo to figures like Klimt. The swirls of Laced Fingers become almost immersive, just as the rich textures that fill the Austrian master’s paintings do. In 2024, Boafo’s long-overdue debut European institutional exhibition opened at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, cementing his place as a canonical artist in both Europe and Africa.
Boafo’s deft and seamless combination of these two artistic lineages and cultural heritages is precisely what makes his work significant. He seems to paint his subjects through a lens of direct experience and clear vision, unencumbered by the colonial gaze that blights historical representations of Black subjects. In Laced Fingers, we see the work of a true master, drawing on various artistic precedents whilst forging a path that is uniquely and singularly his own.
Laced Fingers is currently exhibited at Opera Gallery Paris’s exhibition 'Le Féminin', which runs until June 18th.
