With a career spanning forty years, Kwami was a distinguished artist, art historian and curator, living and working between the UK and his home country, Ghana. His colourful works of vibrant geometric patterns are inspired by a wide range of influences, from Ewe and Asante cloth to jazz, the tradition of mural painting and the design of street kiosks along the roads of West-African towns. Kwami is known for expanding the notions of painting, basing his practice both in the visual world of his native Ghana and in reflections on modernism.

The exhibition showcases work from 1999 to 2021, alongside an abstracted Kiosk structure Money Can’t Buy It (2019) constructed of found wood and conceived of as expanded three-dimensional paintings. The architectural scale work reference to the improvised vernacular of Ghanaian street painting. The show expounds on the range of influences on Kwami’s practice including his extensive travel across the African continent.

Included in the show is the untitled painting that forms thefoundation of his f the mural Dzidzɔ kple amenuveve (Joy andGrace) currently on view at Serpentine in London until September.Contributing to the growing scholarship on the work of Atta Kwami,Melissa Blanchflower, Senior Curator at Turner Contemporaryand editor of the forthcoming monograph, will deliver a talk andwalkthrough of the exhibition on the 31st of May at 11:00am.