Gideon Appah: Beyond the Shadows
11th June, 2025 – 22nd June, 2025
5 rue Bailly, 75003, Paris
Ghanaian painter Gideon Appah is making his Paris debut with a new series of large-format works on view at Gallery 1957. The exhibition, titled Beyond the Shadows, is the gallery’s first project in continental Europe and coincides with Paris Fashion Week and the run-up to Art Basel. For Appah, it marks another step in an international career that has steadily gained attention over the past few years.
Born in Accra, Appah often draws on personal memories, folklore, and collective history to build his imagery. His latest paintings depict quiet, imagined beaches: surfboards resting in the sand, semi-nude figures reclining in the shade, ocean waves forming careful arcs. These are not portraits of real places or people, but scenes that feel familiar—composed with a light touch and an attention to balance, space, and atmosphere.
© Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Photo: Nicolas Brasseur/Pinault Collection.
The work flirts with surrealism without losing its grounding. Arrows hang in pause before their target, divers plunge through rings of broken water. The compositions are calm but never static, built on an interest in form, repetition, and movement.
Appah is also featured in Corps et âmes, the current exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. His pieces The Confidant and The Women Bathing are part of the Pinault Collection, and sit comfortably among works that explore the relationship between the body and emotion, identity and landscape.
In Beyond the Shadows, Appah references outdoor painting traditions and the quiet drama of light moving across a surface—gestures that nod to Impressionism without mimicking it. The result is a set of paintings that feel both distant and close, imagined and grounded. Appah’s vision isn’t concerned with strict narratives or grand statements. Instead, he offers a space to pause—halfway between memory and invention.
Gideon Appah: Beyond the Shadows opens on the 11th of June, 2025 until the 22nd of June, 2025 at 5 rue Bailly, Paris
©2025 Gallery 1957
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