In Gideon Appah’s debut exhibition with Pace, and his first solo exhibition in the UK, the Ghanaian-born artist takes over all three rooms of the gallery’s London space in Hanover Square.
These new works show Appah continuing to explore and experiment with scale, form, colour, and composition. His striking bold and colorful paintings - otherworldly and with flattened perspective - confront the viewer, presenting stylised people, animals and locations in highly-painterly mise-en-scènes which have a distinctly mystical overtone, and an added background narrative of both African and universal folklore.
Drawing on both personal memories and his experiences of popular culture, Appah’s almost theatrical compositions at times seem to be representing actual situations, though ones distilled through a dream, and it has been said that his works cast the viewer as a voyeur, giving at times a palpable sense of “is this secret, should I be seeing this?”
The almost two-metre square Red Sun for example, features a scene that, while quotidian and familiar-feeling at first, quickly acquires more depth as the viewer contemplates Appah’s characteristically naked or nearly naked protagonists together with the strangely-coloured landscape they are both in and portrayed against. Working with the twin influences of imagination and memory what had seemed immediately understandable acquires an unfamiliar and ambiguous tilt.
Appah says that painting is an intuitive act, translating the self to the exterior world - “it scares me sometimes because I don’t know where that work is coming from”, he says. He works from sources including his own childhood, his family, newspaper clippings, music videos, cinema, and early ethnographic images, producing pieces that combine the contemporary within the historical and imbuing the paintings with a familiarity alongside an otherness, a “now” together with a general timelessness.
These large-scale works, with his combination of expressionist, saturated colors - blues, pinks, whites and greens - alongside loose, gestural, rough brushstrokes, give both an immediate urgency and a comforting reassurance to his work.
The exhibition Gideon Appah: How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights is at Pace, London until April 15.
Gideon Appah: born Ghana 1987, where he continues to live and work.
Born in Accra, Ghana in 1987, Gideon Appah received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana in 2012. After graduating with a BFA in Painting, Appah held his first exhibition in Ghana, including his first solo exhibition at the Goethe Institute in Accra in 2013. Other important exhibitions of his work include Gideon Appah: Forgotten, Nudes, Landscapes, Institute for Contemporary Art at University of Commonwealth Virginia, Richmond (2022); Blue Boys Blues, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2020); Orderly Disorderly, Ghana Science Museum, Accra (2017); Clay Objects (Past and Present Aesthetics), Nubuke Foundation, Accra (2013); and End of Year Exhibition, K.N.U.S.T Museum, Kumasi, Ghana (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 (2016) and a solo show at the Absa Gallery (2017), both in Johannesburg, South Africa. 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.
