Larry Amponsah
Genesis: The Plan & The Promise

The Breeder is pleased to present “Genesis: The Plan & The Promise”, Larry Amponsah’s first exhibition in Athens, which furthers the artist’s investigation of the politics and modes of image-making.

At the centre of this presentation lies a new series of large-scale collage paintings, which takes as a starting point summoned images from popular magazines like Vogue, Vanity Fair and Bazaar. Cutting into the hundreds of stereotyped images of “White beauty” and dominant ideas of representation, Amponsah then morphs the original pictures into a series of compelling portraits of Black people that reference his Ghanaian heritage and the greater global Black narratives. For the paintings presented here, Amponsah used a selection of these miniature collages, deploying a succession of creative strategies on them including digital manipulations, physical collage, new printing techniques and painting.

The canvases are layered with various details which are either collaged or directly drawn onto the surface, adding depth and materiality to the constructed floral environments and enriching the narratives of their inhabitants. Fruits, plants, vegetables and flowers are carefully transplanted into each work attempting to visually recreate the artist’s imagined idea of his protagonists’ psychological landscape and internal workings. The result is a new series of portraits, whose dynamic and fluid compositions invite the viewers to become active participants in the narrative surrounding the black body and the politics of representation. Amponsah employs here various visual elements, in an attempt to invent formulas that try to tackle complex questions of identity and what it means to live in a black body today.

Works like “Must It Take 19 Books and A Clock?” introduce Amponsah’s vision of “true representations of contemporary Blackness that challenge the global stereotypical ideologies historically associated with people of African origin”. With references to materiality, identity and culture, they display a rich community of people that conjures ideas of knowledge, independence, fluidity and complexity.

With these beautifully crafted portals, Amponsah ultimately pushes the boundaries of his medium, painting, through a horticultural approach of planting, which is full of life and vitality, hope and possibilities whilst confronting some of the unresolved key questions on the language of painting, and the possibilities of representation in the history of art.

Larry Amponsah is an Associate Lecturer at the Camberwell Collage of Art – UAL and received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2018) after studying at Jiangsu University China (2016) and at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi in Ghana (2015). From 2018-2020 he was a Trustee of The Kuenyehia Art Trust in Ghana, was shortlisted for the 2019 Dentons Art Prize and won the Be Smart About Art Award in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘When A Stone Cracks, We Don’t Stitch’, 50 Golborne, London (2019); ‘The Open City of Many Gods’ Billboard, Bloc Projects, Sheffield (2019) and ‘Imaginary Direction of Time’, Fine Art Gallery, CSU-Pueblo Hoag Hall, Colorado (2018). Recent group exhibitions include ‘DEAR’, Dyson Gallery, RCA Battersea, London (2019); ‘DAMNED IF I DO… DAMNED IF I DON’T’ for Open Space’s: Of Hosts & Guests, Pushkin House, London (2019); ‘FBA Futures Exhibition’, Mall Galleries, London (2019); ‘SURGE’, East Wing Biennial 13, Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2018); ‘YOUNG GUNS’, Sulger-Buel Lovell Gallery, London (2018); ‘Open House CCA’, Delfina Foundation, London (2017); ‘What is your local word for ‘Smile’?’, ArtXanady’s Pop-up Gallery, Labone, Ghana (2016); and ‘The Gown Must Go To Town’, Museum of Science and Technology, Accra (2015), amongst others.