Amoako Boafo Reclaims the Portrait
It Doesn’t Have to Always Make Sense · Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice · May 6–November 22, 2026
There may be no more loaded place to hang a contemporary portrait than a sixteenth-century Venetian palazzo — and that is exactly the point. For his first solo exhibition in Italy, the Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo installs new work across the historic rooms of Palazzo Grimani, where his subjects meet centuries of European portraiture on their own terms.
Boafo is best known for his technique: he paints faces and bodies with his fingers, pressing and dragging pigment directly onto the canvas, so that every portrait carries the literal trace of the hand that made it. The effect is intimate, almost tender — skin rendered in swirls and ridges of paint that feel alive up close.
His sitters are friends, family, members of the African diaspora, painted with a dignity and ease that the Western canon rarely afforded Black subjects. Set against the Grimani’s gilded walls and frescoed ceilings, they do not ask permission to be there. They simply belong — gazing back at a tradition that long excluded them, with quiet, unbothered authority.
Produced in collaboration with Gagosian and timed to coincide with the 61st Venice Biennale, the show is among the season’s most anticipated. It is also a fitting anchor for a summer spent thinking about presence, ease, and who gets to be seen at rest.
