Artist Gideon Appah @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - "The Play of Thought" Exhibition

Gideon Appah: The Play of Thought 

Pace Gallery, Seoul 

March 20 - April 27, 2024 

Gideon Appah 

Will You Ever be Here Again? (2023) 

© Gideon Appah, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new works by Gideon Appah at its gallery in Seoul Marking the artist’s second solo show with the gallery since he joined its program in 2022, and his first-ever solo exhibition in Asia, this presentation features paintings and drawings that examine memory and sensuality through Gideon Appah’s virtuosic compositional arrangements and his surrealist visual language. The exhibition is accompanied by a digital catalogue produced by Pace Publishing.

Known for his rich, jewel-toned figurations, Gideon Appah paints utopian landscapes that serve as intuitive, outward translations of the inner self. The oneiric, often coastal realms of Appah’s paintings are inhabited by nude and semi-nude figures inspired by the artist’s imaginative readings of archival imagery. Using layered impasto, Gideon Appah constructs worlds that, though visually flattened, take on a seemingly infinite breadth that is at times unsettling and, alternatively, inviting and seductive.

In the new paintings, Gideon Appah expands his expressions of memory and cultural identity through his evolving technique and renewed commitment to his distinctive surrealist vocabulary. Within his expansive canvases, life-size athletic figures find anchorage in meticulously crafted landscapes made up of careful interplays of line, color, light, and shade. Appah’s substantial and layered application of paint dissolves any suggestion of rigidity in his compositions—an effect that he accentuates by revealing areas of undercoat. Left unworked, these abstract sections of lightly washed and dripped paint give rise to almost identifiable forms from within the canvases. Further subverting narrative expectations is the apparent indifference of the figures to one another and the viewer—as if in a memory or dream, they embrace, swim, play music, and recline in states of undisturbed reverie.

Drawing inspiration for his paintings from a vast visual archive that includes newspaper clippings, family photographs, and Ghanaian films and documentaries—especially those made during a major period of cultural production after the country gained independence in 1957—Gideon Appah imbues his works with a uniquely cinematic, scenographic quality. In an act of creative reinvention, the artist transforms moving images from film for his two-dimensional works, suspending time and dislocating any sense of place in the process. His interest in monochromatic imagery is also central to his approach—for Gideon Appah, black-and-white film is not limiting but rather a perfect vehicle for investigating the expressive potential of light, shade, and hue. Guided by images he has encountered in classic Ghanaian cinema, he overlays vibrant colors onto these scenes, making them entirely new and uniquely his own.

Throughout Gideon Appah’s oeuvre, surrealist motifs abound. Disembodied heads, smoking hands, and suited torsos float alongside similarly uprooted—or unrooted—vegetation, merging seamlessly into the atmosphere of individual works. Also featured in Seoul will be a selection of charcoal drawings showcasing these motifs, marking the artist's debut exhibition of works on paper with Pace. Initially conceived as preparatory sketches, Gideon Appah now regards them as standalone works. Taking on a dreamlike sensibility detached from any identifiable narrative, these monochromatic drawings, alongside The Sensitivity of Everyday Things series—an ongoing body of paintings that explore the rituals of daily life—offer visitors insight into his imaginative process.

For a brief biography see :

Gideon Appah, How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights 

Pace Gallery, London , March 15 – April 15, 2023

PACE GALLERY SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Gideon Appah @ Pace Gallery, London - "How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights" Exhibition

Gideon Appah 

How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights 

Pace Gallery, London 

March 15 – April 15, 2023 

GIDEON APPAH 

Red Sun, 2022

Oil and acrylic on canvas, 179.7 × 200 × 3.8 cm 

© Gideon Appah

Pace Gallery presents Gideon Appah: How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights. Marking Appah’s first solo exhibition in the UK as well as his debut show with Pace, the artist presenst a suite of new, highly ambitious paintings that speak to ideas of identity, memory, and imagination. Taking over the entirety of Pace’s Hanover Square gallery, this exhibition showcases the artist’s unwavering commitment to experimenting with scale, form, colour, and composition.

At the core of Gideon Appah’s artistic practice is a fascination with the intangible. His dreamlike, enigmatic paintings convey emotions that exist beyond the confines of language. For Appah, painting is an intuitive act of translation of the inner self to the exterior world. His singular visual lexicon interlaces fragments from reality and imagination to construct mystical, painterly scenes that resist narrative and classification. A surrealist streak runs through several paintings, further subverting expectations and undermining straightforward readings. For example, in Seated Man (2021-22) a figure looks out to sea while a collection of incongruous objects including oranges and a disembodied hand holding a lit cigarette gathers beside them. Central to Appah’s practice is the rich period of Ghanaian history following the country’s independence in 1957. Appah draws on a diverse array of visual sources – including childhood memories and family photographs as well as old newspaper clippings, music videos, cinema, and early ethnographic images – to create his idiosyncratic paintings that feel at once deeply personal and coolly anonymous.

In How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights, Gideon Appah presents new paintings in his distinctive style that occupies the blurred space between imagination and memory. Appah’s signature use of flattened perspective and ambiguous surroundings evoke ethereal landscapes that appear to exist outside the physical world. In A Love Song (2022) and Red Sun (2022), nude and semi-nude figures move through a seemingly utopian landscape with a sense of ease and grace. The subjects are alert to their surroundings, at once electrified and enmeshed in the undulations of the environment. The lush green carpet of grass in The Dream (2021) mirrors the reclined nude figure’s soft flesh, underscoring the feeling of harmonious equilibrium between human and nature. The colour palette of rich, jewel toned blues, reds, pinks, and greens draw the viewer into Gideon Appah’s cinematic world.

Gideon Appah’s large-scale canvases position the viewer as a voyeur, stumbling upon secretive or private gatherings set in otherworldly landscapes. Stretching across four meters, Appah’s diptych Cloud Men (2021-23) depicts seven tall men dressed in dark suits towering over the viewer – an impression that is further heightened by the low horizon line against an expansive blue sky. With all but two figures facing away from the viewer, the suggestion is a covert conversation. Appah evokes a sense of glamour and ceremony in the uncertain setting, leaving the viewer to interpret the scene with their own imagination.

The landscape that surrounds Gideon Appah’s studio is also a major source of inspiration, as he seeks to capture the sensation of the vast clouds and fields visible from the farm on which his studio is situated. By stitching together real and imagined memories, fantasies, and scenes from everyday life, Appah constructs quasi-theatrical compositions that contain an uncertain narrative, stripping them of the signifiers of identity in order to leave them open to individual interpretation.

GIDEON APPAH (b. 1987, Accra, Ghana) creates figurative paintings, drawings, and mixed media works with subjects and imagery drawn from his memory and imagination as well as Ghanaian history and popular culture. Appah began his artistic training at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, initially taking up watercolour to explore and deepen his understanding of the power of colour. In 2022, the artist presented his first institutional solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. His work—which has been featured in the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York, the 23rd International Exhibition at the Triennale di Milano in Italy, and other major international exhibitions—can be found in the collections of the Absa Museum, Johannesburg; the Musée d'Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden, Marrakesh; and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. Appah was shortlisted for the 2016 Kuenyehia Art Prize and the 2022 Henrike Grohs Art Award. The artist lives and works in Accra, he is a member of the blaxTARLINES collective.

PACE GALLERY

5 Hanover Square, London

www.pacegallery.com