Goodman Gallery is delighted to present Dynamic Equilibrium, Atta Kwami’s second solo exhibition with the gallery since announcing representation of the estate in partnership with Beardsmore Gallery. Spanning works made between 1999 and 2020, the exhibition highlights the breadth of Kwami’s singular practice and reaffirms his place as one of the most important African abstract painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Kwami spent the first fifty years of his life in Africa, a period that shaped his artistic vision in lasting ways. Early influences included the kiosks, hand-painted signage and improvised architecture of West African towns – structures whose forms translated into his paintings in ways that always suggested scale, even in the smallest works. These environments, together with Ewe and Asante textile design, jazz, and the tradition of mural painting, offered him a vocabulary of grids, rhythms and chromatic relationships through which he developed a profoundly original language. Whether in architectural structures or textiles, Kwami found vehicles for exploring the expressive and structural potential of colour: blocks and stripes of uneven sizes converge and diverge in patterns that evoke cadence, syncopation and the paradoxical tensions he sought to hold “in a moment”.
The exhibition title draws from a phrase that held deep significance for the artist. In 2014, while visiting Tate Liverpool, Kwami encountered a wall text from the exhibition Mondrian and His Studios. Lacking his notebook, he borrowed his wife Pamela’s sketchbook to copy down a passage describing Mondrian’s notion of “dynamic equilibrium” – a concept that resonated strongly with him:
