Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe: Where the Waters Meet

Gallery 1957 is proud to present Where the Waters Meet, a solo exhibition by Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, opening in Accra on the 21st October, 2025 in the lead up to Accra Cultural Week.

In Where the Waters Meet, Otis Quaicoe returns to Ghana with a body of work that celebrates black leisure, joy, and the radical act of rest. Marking his first solo exhibition in his country of birth, this homecoming is also a meditation on water—its capacity to hold us, to offer respite, and its particular significance for black bodies navigating histories of exclusion and belonging. Here, pools and oceans become sites of reclamation, spaces where pleasure is not only possible but essential.

Currently based in the United States, Quaicoe describes Ghana as his peace — a space of clarity, lightness, and deep connection. Here, surrounded by family, friends, and familiar rhythms, his creative process shifts. It becomes weightless, instinctive, and free. This new body of work embraces that feeling: an exploration of imagined spaces of play, rest, and ease.

This sense of freedom extends to his process and palette. Quaicoe works in a tonal range of black and grey, building the skin of his subjects through layered contrasts that give their forms a sculptural presence. His brushwork is multidirectional, strokes flowing together and apart like waves meeting and parting, echoing the movement of water itself throughout the canvas.

Within these painted worlds, the figures Quaicoe depicts are drawn from life—people he knows intimately—but the spaces they inhabit feel dreamlike. Memory and imagination intertwine as real settings dissolve into idealised spaces of rest and leisure. Pristine lawns, clear blue waters, and idyllic skies frame these moments of ease; manicured gardens and high walls enclose private sanctuaries where his subjects can simply be.

Yet even in leisure, there are layers. In Intermission II, a young woman sits at the edge of a pool—book in hand, drink beside her, the day stretching unhurried around her—but her fingers mark her place as if interrupted. A subtle tension inhabits the scene. Quaicoe captures something essential about black life: that full surrender is rarely possible, that pleasure and alertness must sometimes coexist. But there are also moments when caution gives way to freedom. In Diver, a woman dives—arms extended, body suspended between sky and water. To dive is to not know how you will land, and in this freefall there is both freedom and faith. Against an endless blue, she lets go completely, trusting the water to receive her.

The exhibition’s title, Where the Waters Meet, evokes thresholds and confluences—the Atlantic that connects Ghana and the diaspora, the swimming pools and oceans where bodies find buoyancy and freedom. It speaks to cultural exchange, to the artist’s movement between Portland and Accra, and to the broader project of recognising shared humanity across geography and experience. Quaicoe invites us to step into these painted worlds as we might step into water: open, trusting, unguarded. Within them, we are offered permission to float, to drift, and to be suspended in pleasure without justification.

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