Gideon Appah

Place: Accra

Born: 1987

Biography:

Gideon Appah draws on childhood memories and dreams, as well as West African landscapes and popular culture for his dazzling, bold, and jewel-toned paintings. As a child, Appah’s first medium was charcoal, which his grandmother used to cook meals at home. His early works are an ode to his hometown of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and incorporate images associated with daily life such as lottery numbers and other symbols present in the social and economic fabric of the city. Appah’s work investigates his childhood as well as local mythologies, ethereal landscapes, rivers, domestic interiors, and recurring figures both imagined and known, such as his grandmother and brother. The artist often paints in tones of royal blue, crimson, dark orange, and white over found and collaged posters, prints, photographs, and film stills, many of these centering on occupations his family members have held within their community such as barber and tailor shops. Mixing photographic images with paint, Appah employs a process of priming the canvas and sketching the composition before transferring prints from paper onto the canvas using a mixture of glue and water. After the canvas dries, he carves out the images, making them visible before applying paint. Most recently, the artist has utilised oil paint, working in a more flattened perspective and using a rich palette to condense impasto brushstrokes. Appah creates dream-like worlds through a fauvist lens, examining personal and homeland histories such as Ghanaian postcolonial cinema, leisure culture, and nightlife, using newspaper clippings from the 1950s. Gideon Appah was born in Accra, Ghana in 1987. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts at The Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana in 2012. His first solo exhibition dubbed "sensation" at the Goethe Institute in Accra a year after his BFA graduation. Since, Gideon has held exhibitions in Ghana and internationally including Turbine art fair, Johannesburg Art fair and a solo booth at 1:54 Art fair in New York in 2018. Growing up in a large family, the works are reflective of a life characterized by strong emotional bonds, religious activities and folklore. Through nostalgic blues, deep green landscapes and charcoal, his dreamlike compositions place typical domestic interiors from 1980s and 90s Ghana against surreal landscapes. Using thick, rough applications of acrylic upon collaged layers of appropriated posters, prints and photographs, Appah directly references his own familial histories. The posters used - advertising haircuts, barber shops and tailoring - relate to occupations of his aunts, uncles and grandparents, the overall result becoming an artistic archive of communal life in Accra.