Amoako Boafo: I Do Not Come To You By Chance
10th April, 2025 – 24th May 2025
Gagosian
20 Grosvenor Hill
London, W1K 3DQ
United Kingdom
With I Do Not Come to You by Chance, Amoako Boafo makes his first solo appearance in the United Kingdom, inaugurating an exhibition at Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery that is as much a portrait of personal history as it is a statement of artistic vision. Taking its title from Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s 2009 novel, the exhibition marks Boafo’s debut with the gallery in London and signals a new phase in his evolving practice.
At the heart of the show is a dialogue between memory and material. In collaboration with architect and designer Glenn DeRoche—his creative partner on previous projects including a residency in Ogbojo, Ghana—Boafo has transformed the gallery space into something closer to a homecoming. Across three rooms, he maps out a narrative that is as autobiographical as it is architectural.
Visitors enter through a wallpapered vestibule before arriving at a full-scale reimagining of the courtyard from Boafo’s childhood home. Here, paintings are not simply hung—they are lived with, surrounded by the textures and shapes of the artist’s formative years. The installation draws attention to the role of place in shaping identity and artistic impulse. In the final gallery, a double-sided freestanding canvas, housed within sculptural wooden panels, evokes the Adinkra symbol nkyinkyim, or “twisting”—a metaphor for resilience and adaptation. Two life-size female figures, painted with Boafo’s trademark finger-strokes, emerge as emblems of that same spirit.
I make paintings that allow me to celebrate where I come from and what I aspire to be, while sharing unique perspectives and understanding.
Amoako Boafo
The exhibition foregrounds the figure—Black, poised, and present—with the artist continuing to render his subjects using fingertips rather than brushes, a tactile gesture that imbues each portrait with a disarming immediacy. Faces meet the viewer’s gaze with clarity and quiet assertion; the effect is both intimate and grounded.
His self-portraits, meanwhile, offer more than simple likenesses. They pose questions about masculinity, vulnerability, and self-representation. In Self-Portrait with Cacti (2024), Boafo stretches across a bed, surrounded by greenery, the room echoing a kind of lush domestic calm. The canvas, one of his largest to date at over four metres in length, is less a declaration than a moment of repose. Nearby, Black Cycle (2025) captures the artist mid-motion, his attire a direct visual echo of the wallpaper seen at the gallery’s entrance—an intentional layering of motif and memory.
Boafo’s vision resists the static or the singular. His Ghana is not a backdrop but a living, breathing presence—evoked not through romanticised symbols but through textures, walls, and gestures that resonate with authenticity. In evoking the courtyard of his youth, the artist pays homage not only to family, but to a wider community of Ghanaian painters—Aplerh-Doku Borlabi, Kwesi Botchway, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, and Eric Adjei Tawiah among them—who shaped and sustained a local culture of creativity.
What emerges from I Do Not Come to You by Chance is a body of work that is both deeply personal and expansively communal. Boafo invites the viewer not merely to look, but to step inside—to share in the spaces that have shaped him, and to consider, with quiet insistence, the lives and histories that so often go unseen.
Amoako Boafo: I Do Not Come To You By Chance opens on the 10th of April, 2025 until the 24th of May 2025 at Gagosian
©2025 Gagosian
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