Artist Database

Acclaimed contemporary African portrait artist, Amoako Boafo, was born in Accra, Ghana and currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Boafo attended Ghanatta College of Art and Design and graduated in 2008. On graduating, he was awarded the Best Portrait Painter of the Year award. He moved to Austria in 2014 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he began to paint Black figures in a style influenced by Egon Sheile. In 2017, he was awarded the Walter Koschatzky Art Prize. The artist is known for his large striking finger-painted images presenting Black bodies, placed in sharp contrast with mostly single colour backgrounds, gazing at the viewer with a stern, commanding intensity.

Boafo has participated regularly in several solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including most recently at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, The Royal Academy in London, and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. His work is sought after and has been collected by several prestigious museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is represented worldwide in public and private collections. The artist has participated in numerous residencies and has recently entered into a collaboration with famous French fashion house, Dior.