Afia Prempeh

Afia Prempeh (b. 1986 Kumasi, Ghana) is a genre-bending painter whose practice uses aesthetic traditions as a means of hacking them. Her background in still-life and landscape painting informs her interdisciplinary approach to portraiture. A slow-process and detail-oriented perfectionist, Prempeh spent years avoiding the human figure. When she graduated from art school and began supporting herself from commissions, she found that she could not escape requests for portraits. The artist chose to face her fears—while giving her clients more than what they asked for. She would bring in multiple compositional strategies, and she would use her subjects’ stories to explore narrative. The residency with Gallery 1957 marks the first time Prempeh has had the luxury to develop a solo body of work. Her ongoing struggle to balance her independent interests with market demands thus takes a different shape.