I Bring Home with Me

Expanding on Boafo's exploration and celebration of Blackness and its diverse subjectivities, the exhibition features a group of new paintings that are integrated within an architectural re-creation of the artist's studio in Accra, Ghana, built to scale inside the gallery. Conceived by Boafo in collaboration with architect and designer Glenn DeRoche of DeRoche Projects, the installation reflects the creative energy of his cultural background, highlighting how his community personally influences his practice and holds formative emotional significance for the artist. The title of the exhibition, I Bring Home with Me, refers to Boafo's process of documenting images, sounds, people, stories and events that shape his sense of place. Boafo's portraits of Black subjects-ranging from friends and acquaintances to public figures and fictional characters-are exquisitely rendered in his graphic compositional approach, which incorporates patterns and paper transfers as well as a distinctive gestural mark-making that evokes 20th-century modernism from a contemporary point of view. The variety of subjects that Boafo depicts, as well as his method of applying paint with his fingertips, is a testament to the rich complexity of Black subjectivity and self-expression generated throughout the cultures of contemporary Africa and its global diaspora.