Gideon Appah

Gideon Appah was born in 1987 in Accra, Ghana, and continues to live and work there. He studied painting at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, graduating with a BFA in 2012. His first exhibition was held at the Goethe Institut in Accra in 2013, and he has developed a painting practice that draws on Ghanaian cultural ephemera — film stills, newspaper clippings, entertainment posters, and lottery graphics from the 1950s through the 1980s — which he incorporates into his canvases through a process of priming, print transfer, and painted intervention.

Appah's paintings create dream-like worlds through a fauvist application of color, combining personal and family history with Ghanaian postcolonial cinema, folklore, leisure culture, and nightlife. His characteristic palette of royal blue, crimson, dark orange, and white is applied over found and collaged material, producing compositions in which domestic and mythological space converge. Recurring figures — his grandmother, his brother, barbers and tailors, imagined and known characters — inhabit luscious landscapes and interior scenes rendered with compressed perspective and a sensuous handling of paint that bears the influence of Kerry James Marshall, Barkley L. Hendricks, and Bob Thompson.

Appah has had solo exhibitions at Pace Gallery in New York, Seoul, and London, at Gallery 1957 in Accra, and at Mitchell-Innes & Nash and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond (2022). His work is held in the collections of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Absa Museum in Johannesburg, and the Musée d'Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden in Marrakesh. He is represented by Pace Gallery and Gallery 1957.