Amoako Boafo does not use brushes. He paints with his fingers. Dragging, pressing, pulling the oil paint directly across the canvas to build up skin, fabric, and expression with a physical intimacy that no tool could replicate. The technique produces portraits of extraordinary presence: faces that seem to breathe, shoulders that carry weight, clothes that feel like they could be touched. And behind every choice of texture and application is a decision about how to make a Black person feel real on a canvas that has, for most of art history, not bothered.

 

Boafo was born in Accra, Ghana in 1984 and studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design before moving to Vienna in 2010 to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. Vienna was, by his own account, a difficult city: largely unreceptive to Black people, and an art scene that offered little room for the kind of work he wanted to make. But he responded by making it anyway. He began a portrait series of friends, fellow creatives and people he admired as an act of what he has described as self-preservation. A celebration of identity in a city that didn't quite know what to do with it.

In May 2026, Boafo opened his first solo exhibition in Italy, It Doesn’t Have to Always Make Sense, at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice, coinciding with the 61st Venice Biennale.