Gideon Appah

Gideon Appah paints from Accra, drawing on childhood memory, West African landscape, and the social fabric of Ghana — lottery numbers, barber shops, the textures of daily life. His first medium was his grandmother's charcoal. The work still carries that intimacy.

His process is architectural: found posters, film stills, and photographs primed onto canvas, carved out, then painted over in royal blue, crimson, dark orange. The surfaces are dense, collaged, fauvist. The subjects — his grandmother, his brother, figures both known and imagined — move through domestic interiors, rivers, and the night-time leisure culture of post-colonial Ghana.

He studied painting at Kwame Nkrumah University, won the Barclays L'Atelier Prize in 2015, and has shown at ICA Richmond, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, and Gallery 1957. His work is held in collections from Johannesburg to Marrakesh to Toronto.