Simon Lee Gallery announces its representation of the Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey.

Clottey (b. 1985) primarily employs found materials from his hometown in Accra, Ghana to create a dialogue with the city’s cultural history and identity. Utilising everyday objects such as discarded Kufuor gallons, car tyres, and recycling boat wood as his canvas, Clottey inscribes patterns and text that uplift the miscellaneous materials into symbols of Ghana’s vernacular economic system of trade and reuse.

The celebration of the yellow gallon containers, applied throughout Clottey’s work, stems from a desire to find ways to inspire people to work with plastics and recycle in creative ways. This has become a prominent motif throughout his oeuvre, and the artist has named this distinctive practice “Afrogallonism”.

Clottey’s fragmented approach to figuration recalls Western Cubist portraiture, a genre that drew heavily on formal elements of traditional African sculpture.

photo: Stefan Simchowitz