Miami— March 4, 2022 — Amoako Boafo’s career trajectory has been truly mesmerizing. Born in Ghana and now living in Vienna, this contemporary artist keeps massively shaking up the art world with his empowering black figurative paintings. He is a recipient of the Walter Koschatzky Art Prize in 2017, and artist in residence at the Rubell Museum in 2019. By 2020, he was already featured in The Artsy Vanguard 2020 and the Artsy Editorial piece “The Most Influential Artists of 2020” after he made an astounding secondary-market debut with his stylish portrait The Lemon Bathing Suit (2019) that sold for $875,000 at Phillips London. But, did you know…?

1. Boafo collaborated with fashion house Dior for the SS21 menswear collection. Named “Portrait of an artist,” this exciting collection featured Amoako’s unique way of representing Blackness by using different textures and pattern techniques from his artwork.
2. Boafo’s art reached unprecedented grounds when his artwork, “Suborbital Triptych” (2021), was the first to be launched into space. The initiative was a collaboration between the Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin and the aerospace technology company Uplift AeroSpace. The three portraits were painted directly onto pieces of a Blue Origin rocket and made with space-grade paints.
3. Boafo made headlines in 2021 when his painting “Hands Up” (2018) broke his auction record price in a consecutive year selling for $3,423,258 at Christie’s Hong Kong. A tremendous display of the art market’s strength in Asia and a significant breakthrough for a contemporary young Black artist.

Today, he is widely collected by private and public collectors and institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, CCS Bard College Hessel Museum of Art, the Albertina Museum, and the Rubell Museum. Although these three curious facts are beyond impressive, Amoako Boafo’s career is just getting started. In case you missed it, click here for our Focus On Amoako Boafo.

Photo: Amoako Boafo with “Shormeh’s Gold Earrings” (2021) from the “Suborbital Triptych” courtesy of Uplift Aerospace.