Frieze Seoul 2024: Gallery 1957

For the 2024 edition of Frieze Seoul, Gallery 1957 proudly presents a group show featuring a multitude of exalted artists from the continent and the diaspora. This exhibition gathers visual artists who work through diverse aesthetic traditions, including Rita Mawuena Benissan, Amoako Boafo, Kwesi Botchway, Modupeola Fadugba, Yaw Owusu, and Arthur Timothy. The works presented provide a balance between enchanting textiles, striking sculptural paintings, formidable portraiture, and figurative paintings, illuminating the space between reality and the ethereal.

An encompassing conversation on materiality, tactile sensations and changeability exudes through the works of Benissan and Owusu. Through refiguring objects and visual tropes, Benissan and Owusu attract the viewer’s attention with bold colours and maintain intrigue by deconstructing how we view ourselves and our histories. The embroidered tapestries presented by Benissan oscillate between styles inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and communal scenes of archival images from Ghana’s illustrious history.

While Benissan attends to aspects of chieftaincy in Ghana’s visual cultural history, Owusu interrogates of the very foundations of our value systems. His sculptural paintings crafted from alchemically treated coins, invite us to contemplate the vulnerability of value and the socio-political and historical frameworks that influence the economy. They represent tangible means of navigating politics, economics and social identity. The object, which traditionally acts as currency, now becomes objects of curiosity and complexity in a form of coin cladded tapestry.

The reawakening of the portrait tradition and the centring of Black bodies and stories in contemporary art converges amongst painters from the West African artistic lineage. Real and imagined identities are masterfully depicted in the alluring characters and scenes of Boafo, Botchway, Fadugba and Timothy.

Boafo’s iconic stylistic approach to portraiture resonates as being deeply personal while vividly celebrating global black communities, much like his contemporary counterpart and fellow Ghanaian portrait artist, Botchway.

Instantly distinguishable for their blood-red eyes and textured black and violet-hued skin, Botchway’s characters find equilibrium between realism and abstraction. Juxtaposed against the exuberant and powerful gazes of Botchway’s figures, Boafo’s playful use of iconography elevates his expressive figurations to a state of natural vitality.

Fadugba’s captivating exploration of memory, identity, and the passage of time is depicted through the delicate interplay of light, shadow, and reflection in her paintings. The golden and bronze monochrome palette illuminates the subtle interactions between the subjects’ gazes and body language, with the undulating motif of the swimming pool encouraging audiences to reshape themselves like water.

Contrastingly invoking moments frozen in time, Timothy’s radiant canvases convey a strong sense of serenity while probing the inherent limitations of the human condition. Themes of affluence and oppression are illustrated with nuance and attention to history, with his characters lending themselves to a sense of ongoing transformation. Timothy seamlessly weaves together historical narratives from the literary echoes of Maya Angelou to river Nile and the interior of the Pantheon located in the heart of Rome.

The relentless dynamism of the six artists featured in this exhibition open up paths for introspection, drawing upon both collective and personal archives to shed light on our interconnected narratives. When experienced together, these artworks culminate to evoke an expansive scope of cultures.

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