Oku Ampofo

Private Collection, UK, acquired c. 1966

Sotheby’s is proud to debut a work by luminary Ghanaian modernist Oku Ampofo. Trained as a medical doctor in Edinburgh University between 1933 and 1939, Ampofo returned to the then Gold Coast as part of the wave of young African professionals looking to contribute to the development of their country. Despite showing extraordinary promise in the field of medicine, making important contributions to the field of phytotherapy, Ampofo remained a practicing artist throughout his education and career. Ampofo was an important member of the first generation of pioneering postcolonial Ghanaian artists and was critical in the organisation of the watershed Cultural Heritage exhibition in Accra in 1968, which was among the first to put forth an African postcolonial modernist agenda. He achieved widespread acclaim within Ghana, his works even featuring on local television stations. Ampofo’s works were also exhibited internationally, including at The Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (FESMAN) in Senegal in 1966.

The present lot, entitled Head of a Young Boy, demonstrates Ampofo’s acute understanding of precolonial West African sculptural traditions. Ampofo elongates the head of his sitter beyond the point of naturalism, alluding to facial features with sumptuously carved undulations which further emphasise a sense of proportionality akin to that of precolonial sculpture. Ampofo created at least two versions of this work in the 1960s, with notable variations in the bulbosity of the figure’s head, the width and breadth of its nose and the angularity of its lips. In-keeping with the philosophy of Sankofa, a term popularised in the early postcolonial period emphasising the imperative to return to Africa’s precolonial past to chart its postcolonial future, Ampofo adopts the stylistic spirit of traditional West African sculpture, but in the depiction of a contemporaneous secular subject, reifies its prevailing principles for a modern national visual culture.