Year: 2020
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 210 x 240 cm (82 5/8 x 94 1/2 in.)
Acquired from Gallery 1957, 2023
The large painting, consisting of two canvases, depicts a calm water surface in Appah’s signature royal blue. White flowers on the dark green grass resemble stars against the night sky. A man stands confidently with a cigarette between his lips, a woman reclines with her back immersed in the water, and a white sailboat floats on the horizon between the blue water and the red-burning sky. Another figure can be seen standing behind the tree that divides the painting into an arch shape. The title suggests a commonality with the subject of bathing paintings that abounded in the era of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and others. The head of the male figure is in profile, reminiscent of Georges Seurat’s famous work “Bathers at Asnières” (1884). The composition of the triangularly distorted landscape appears to be an inversion of Cézanne’s “The Large Bathers” (1905). The intensity of the colors, the appearance of the figures, and the depiction evocative of Matisse in Fauvism, as often mentioned, are probably the most distinctive features of Appah’s works. Appah must have identified his own cultural background with that fostered in the decolonization of Ghana, the first independent country in Black Africa. Appah’s work is drawn from images extracted from films and newspapers distributed during the 1950s and 1980s, the development and reform period of Ghana. Although it is unclear whether this work is based on a scene from a film or a news photograph, it is clear that the artist intends to superimpose these images over subjects that have been depicted many times throughout the history of Western painting.
