NEW YORK, NY.- Goodman Gallery is presenting ‘Prelude to Mountains’, featuring a selection of early works created over almost two decades (1990-2008). The presentation highlights Kwami’s significant contribution to non-Western expressions of modernism and showcases the pivotal moments that shaped his artistic practice — which coalesced painting, printmaking and sculpture through vibrant compositions.
Often, narratives are reflected in the spirit of the composition and the titles of the works, such as ‘Arlesheim’, ‘Prelude to Mountains’, ‘Carnak’, and ‘Adum’, which is a large commercial area in the Ashanti region of Ghana. ‘Prelude to Mountains’ and ‘Carnak’ are full and layered while works such as ‘Adum’ and ‘Credential’ are elemental, capturing a distillation of form through clarity. In contrast, works such as ‘Zone’ capture the essence of line and structure, influenced by his commissioned projects with the Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine (KCCR), which included designing a wrought iron balustrade and logo for the organization.
Although abstract in nature, Kwami’s works are highly conceptual and richly layered. His painting ‘Two Sisters’ features recurring edging stripes, a theme rooted in his earlier series of “Tana” paperworks created with coloured paper pulp in 1993. Rectangles, the vertex-transitive shape that suggests balance, appear frequently throughout his oeuvre. However, in his works, this shape conveys tension, emphasizing movement and transformation rather than symmetry and proportion. There’s an interplay between flatness, suggestions of landscape, horizons, and texture against seemingly floating and unrestricted forms, as seen in ‘Credential’.
The works in this presentation highlight Atta Kwami’s transition while also revealing the ideas he was interested in early in his career. Thick, simple planes of color, along with lines and patterns on various materials—canvas, calico, and linen—showcase a small part of his long and rich career. During this time, Kwami established a confident and bold style, merging vibrant colors with structured brushwork. His approach to color is both deliberate and spontaneous, evident in the variety of works that trace his artistic journey.
Atta Kwami (b. 1956, Accra, Ghana, d. 2021, UK) composed works of vibrant geometric patterns that 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.
In 2021, the year he died, he was awarded the prestigious Maria Lassnig prize, which recognised later career artists deserving wider career recognition, and, in 2022, The Serpentine unveiled the final public mural commission by Kwami, ‘DzidzƆ kple amenuveve (Joy and Grace)’, which remained on view until September 2024. Later this year the Serpentine will publish a monograph edited by Melissa Blanchflower titled ‘Atta Kwami’, with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln supported by The Maria Lassnig Foundation and marking the first publication dedicated to Kwami’s practice.
Kwami’s work has been exhibited widely, notably creating large-scale public art commissions such as at the Folkestone Triennial in 2021 for which the artist made short-term alien interventions in the landscape. Solo exhibitions include: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (1994-1995), SOAS, University College of London (1995), Geometric Organic, National Museum Accra (1998-1999) and Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2001).
Collections include: the National Museums of Ghana and Kenya; the V&A Museum, London; British Museum, London; the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.
