We are excited to announce our upcoming solo exhibition with Ghanaian contemporary artist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, 30 August - 28 September 2024. While Quaicoe's work has been exhibited and acquired widely by numerous international museums, this will be his first show in Australia.
Quaicoe (B. 1988, Accra, Ghana) is a figurative painter that engages with ideas of empowerment through bright and luminous depictions of men and women from Africa and the Diaspora.
In this new series of paintings, the artist explores the remnants of colonisation in his hometown of Accra, Ghana. The portraits are built up using thick layers of oil paint, often incorporating found objects and patterned collage. References to colonial era uniforms and architecture slowly reveal fragments of histories shared across cultures.
Alongside these works, Quaicoe presents a small group of paintings that draw inspiration from a recent research trip to Australia. During these travels he met with Dennis Golding, a prominent Indigenous artist of the Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay language group, and together they began a dialogue around shared perspectives on struggles under a colonial history, geographically distant yet deeply similar. Each portrait becomes a symbol of the reclamation of cultural identity, embracing the idea of origin and personal narrative as it relates to race dynamics.
His work is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, USA; Los Angeles County Museum, USA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, USA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, USA, and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, USA, among others.
