Notes

The human figure is central to Owusu-Ankomah’s much-admired practice. In his earlier work, which drew heavily on masquerade and African rock paintings, the artist floated his classically proportioned, archetypal male figures against undifferentiated grounds of blue. He later integrated these human presences into compositions featuring grid arrangements of signs, of which this lot is a representative example. The signs obscuring the two male figures in this composition are a mix of adinkra symbols commonly used in Ghanaian textile design and invented hieroglyphs. Works in this style have also incorporated German street signs, Chinese pictographs and commercial logos.¹ The outcome is a richly associative tapestry of invented forms and cultural symbols that present as a remix rather than a transcript of African contemporaneity.

In 1986, after completing his art studies in Accra, Owusu-Ankomah settled in Bremen, Germany. His early exhibiting career was largely limited to Europe. In 1996, he participated in the Dak’Art Biennale, Senegal, heralding a period of diverse engagement that included having a 1997 work acquired for the MTN Art Collection – a key moment in the history of post-apartheid corporate art collections. The present lot forms part of a large, internationally heralded series of works initiated circa 1995 that share the title, Movement. Other notable works in this style include Movement 34 and 36 (both 2004), shown in A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad (2003-04), and Movement 35 and 39 (both 2002), which appeared in the globe-hopping exhibition Africa Remix (2004-07).

The numbering of the Movement series is jumbled and of less importance than the consistency of the artist’s depiction of translucent male figures set within rhythmic grids of symbols. This work formed part of a trio of paintings (Movement I-III) exhibited at Stevenson in 2006. The exhibition drew together a cohort of now-celebrated artists with African connections living elsewhere in the world – among them Julie Mehretu – who, as a matter of course, negotiates “their relative distance and closeness to the continent”.² It is a negotiation familiar to Owusu-Ankomah, who maintains strong links with Ghana. “We are tormented by movement,” he has said. “To move is to strive for perfection. Music, dance and sports are an expression of the dynamics of movements. The human has been on the move at all times.”³

^1. Hallie Ringle (2010) Exploring Identity: The Art of El Anatsui and Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah, unpublished honours thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, page 6.
^2. Michael Stevenson & Joost Bosland (2006) Distant Relatives/ Relative Distance, Cape Town: Michael Stevenson, page 12.
^3. Ibid., page 30.

Provenance

Stevenson, Cape Town, June 2006.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Stevenson, Cape Town, Distant Relatives/Relative Distance, 7 June to 5 August 2006.

Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, Distant Relatives/Relative Distance, 1 November to 2 December 2006.

Literature

Michael Stevenson and Joost Bosland (2006) Distant Relatives/ Relative Distance, Cape Town, Stevenson, illustrated on pages 3, 33 and 35.