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Profile:
Owusu-Ankomah (Ghana/Germany)
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Owusu-Ankomah, Woman,1998,
Oil on Canvas
This piece is for sale, from the October Gallery
Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah was born in Secondi, Ghana
in 1956, shortly before that country achieved Independence from British colonial
rule. His artistic career began with studies at the College of Art (Ghanatta)
in Accra. In 1986, he moved to Europe in order to broaden his artistic horizons,
and has since been living near Bremen in Germany. He has exhibited widely in
Germany, the United Kingdom, Senegal, South Africa and Cuba.
Owusu-Ankomah's paintings, many of which are quite large in scale, are immediate
recognisable in style and make use of highly contrastive colours. The paintings
show an eclectic mix of styles drawing on elements from different periods and
distinct styles, including: early cave drawings, the Renaissance, pre-colonial
African art and the graffiti styles of the modern age. Owusu-Ankomah exemplifies
the contemporary African artist who is as at home integrating elements of the
western canon into his canvases as assimilating forms from various African traditions.
His device of using repeating symbols across the picture plane - many from widely
divergent sources, Chinese ideograms to Adinkra glyphs - marks him as
an artist who has gone beyond the simplistic assumptions of cultural specificity
to the recognition that all contemporary art takes place in a common space shared
by artists from all cultures. Owusu-Ankomah's large black and white canvases
make impressive use of subtle trompe l'oeil effect where figurative forms
- often, though not uniquely, male torsos - are both hidden and revealed by
the calligraphic interplay of these repeated symbolic forms.