Atta Kwami prints collection

This collection of colourful contemporary works by artist Atta Kwami demonstrate his interest in playing with contrasting abstract and figurative components and in the ways that figurative forms can be composed from geometrical units.

Atta Kwami is an artist, scholar and curator based in Ghana and the UK. Born in Accra, Ghana in 1956, and trained in both Ghana and the UK, he has exhibited and taught internationally.

In the summer of 2014 Kwami spent three days in Liverpool sketching African artworks in the World Museum collection. He was inspired to create a series of sixteen vibrant lino prints based on his sketches. Each print was created by cutting blocks of lino into specific shapes, which Kwami inked with different colours and placed together in a particular arrangement to make a colourful baseprint. He then printed another layer of blocks on top cut with designs from his reworked sketches, which reveal the base colours in some areas, but which over-print the underlying colours in other areas.

In these prints Kwami reframes and reworks his sketches to provide stimulating new ways of seeing and thinking about the sketched artefacts. The prints complement the museum’s collection of African artefacts and, in their own way, add new meaning and cultural relevance to it.

These prints are on display in our Prints in Counterpoint display in our World Cultures gallery.