Kwesi Botchway Explores the Black Gaze in Latest Exhibition
On view at Vielmetter in Los Angeles.
Kwesi Botchway is a Ghanaian painter who recreates ordinary and imaginary scenes that explore multiple vantage points of Black identity. There’s More Than What the Eye Witnesses is a new solo exhibition by the artist, in which he reflects the Black gaze.
Housed at Vielmetter gallery in Los Angeles, Botchway is presenting 18 oil and acrylic paintings, along with an installation of wooden frames sourced from his hometown of Accra, Ghana, where he lives and works. “In Botchway’s compositions,” wrote curator Essence Harden, “the act of seeing becomes a material, geographic, and refracted meditation wherein both figure and audience are bound in a series of echoes, nearing infinity, create a serializing effect of vantage.
Created in a quasi-fauvist pastiche, the paintings in We Are In This Together and A Fine Night In A Blue Room alters the viewer’s perception “as an agent in seeing, shifting the notion of the Black subject as an object instead of asserting that these Black people see you too. The engagement here is a haptic one where touch and sensation are imbued in each work and by the particulars of the viewing audience, creating a productive tension—within seeing,” Harden added.
The exhibition is approaching its final week and will conclude on June 24.
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Vielmetter
1700 S Santa Fe Ave #101
Los Angeles, CA 90021
