Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe

Oil paintings by Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe depict friends, family and strangers with rich contouring and thick impasto. The works contrast bright oranges, yellows, reds and blues against the dark skin tones of their figures, created with a mix of deep grey, purple and black pigments. Cultural empowerment is at the heart of Quaicoe’s practice, who was born in Ghana but now lives and works in the United States, a move that has profoundly informed his art. Growing up, Quaicoe was inspired by cinema: both the films that he watched and the hand-painted posters that advertised them. References to African and American pop culture feature throughout, as well as fashion and American portrait painters such as Barkley L. Hendricks and Amy Sherald. Each painting proffers its own nuanced narrative, “the idea is to be the channel between the unheard and the rest of the world.”

Quaicoe is not driven to create a physical likeness to the people he paints, but instead focuses on embodying their energy and atmosphere. Alimatu Yussif (2019) depicts the Ghanian model of the same name sitting upright on a wooden stool with the cool, unabashed poise of a fashion editorial. Her tapered suit captures the androgynous feel of her work as a model, engulfed in block orange sandy textures. While inherently ambiguous, the strength of her almost-frowning expression is that it does not hide vulnerability, but embraces it as power - an ode to Yussif herself and a spectacle of cultural celebration expressed in the sunlit joy of orange, black and grey. As Quaicoe puts it himself, “everyone has their own life, their own story... if you listen.”