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.
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”.
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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:
Dynamic Equilibrium
“Just as he imagined his studio to be a dynamic environment, Mondrian rejected the idea of static forms of balance and harmony in his paintings. To reinforce this, in the early 1930s, Mondrian began to use the seemingly contradictory phrase ‘dynamic equilibrium’, by which he expressed the view that art can reveal to us what he described as the ‘perpetual movement of changing oppositions’ instead of continually repeating established formulae.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist on Atta Kwami: A Legacy of African Abstraction
Kwami recognised in this idea a parallel to his own pursuit: a painting practice attuned to shifting oppositions – structure and improvisation, order and play, tradition and reinvention. Whether working with paint, installations or his iconic louver panels, his compositions reveal a belief that abstraction could hold multiplicity without collapsing it into uniformity.
In addition, colour was central to Kwami’s thinking – expressive, structural, symbolic. Works titled Sika Futuru (Gold Dust, in Twi) draw on associations of value, shimmer and luminosity, while Red, Gold and Green references the colours shared across Ghanaian and pan-African cultural identity. His palette often draws subtle parallels with Mondrian’s use of primary colour as a vehicle for clarity and tension, yet Kwami reimagines these relationships through West African chromatic traditions. Across the exhibition, 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.”
To show Dynamic Equilibrium in Cape Town is to return Kwami’s work to a context that helped shape his artistic relationships and his investment in pan-African dialogue. The artist’s connection to South Africa stretches back decades. In 1997, he was an artist-in-residence at the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in Johannesburg; that same year he exhibited a green-and-yellow hut at the Johannesburg Biennale – an homage to the street kiosks of Ghana. He later coordinated the SaNsA International Artists’ Workshop in Kumasi, Ghana, as part of the global Triangle Arts Trust network, a platform that facilitated collaboration and exchange among artists across Africa and the world.
Seen together, the works in Dynamic Equilibrium offer a renewed appreciation of Kwami’s lifelong engagement with the built environment, music, textile traditions and abstraction. They testify to an artist who continually expanded the possibilities of painting, finding within the grid a space for freedom, contradiction, and the “perpetual movement” that animated his vision.
Artist Bio
Atta Kwami (b. 1956, Accra, Ghana, d. 2021, UK) was a distinguished artist, art historian and curator, living and working between the UK and his home country, Ghana. His colourful works of vibrant geometric patterns are inspired by a wide range of influences, from Ewe and Assante cloth to jazz, the tradition of mural painting and the design of street kiosks along the roads of West-African towns. Kwami is known for expanding the notions of painting, basing his practice both in the visual world of his native Ghana and in reflections on modernism.
Atta Kwami studied, and later taught at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). In 2007, Kwami received a PhD in art history, now published as 'Kumasi Realism, 1951-2007: An African Modernism,' in which he sought to explore past and present influences on West African art, with an emphasis on street art traditions throughout Kumasi, Ghana.
In 2021, the year he died, he was awarded the prestigious Maria Lassnig prize, which recognised later career artists deserving wider career recognition, and, in 2022, The Serpentine unveiled the final public mural commission by Kwami, 'DzidzƆ kple amenuveve (Joy and Grace)', which remained on view until September 2024.
In the spring of 2024, the Serpentine published a monograph about Kwami with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln supported by The Maria Lassnig Foundation and marking the first publication dedicated to examining the breadth of Kwami’s singular practice.
Kwami’s work is included in major collections around the world, including the National Museums of Ghana and Kenya; the V&A Museum, London; the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.
