Policies controlled 2, 2017
Plastics, wires, and oil paint
79 x 60 in (200.7 x 152.4 cm)
COUNTY is pleased to present People and Place, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the renowned Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey.
The tightly curated selection of works in People and Place are all made from upcycled yellow jerrycans, Clottey’s signature material which forms the basis for his innovative, socially-oriented Afrogallonism practice. The rich variety of yellows in these works are a testament to the material histories of the jerrycans themselves, some of which have become sun-bleached and weathered from decades of use. Originally manufactured to store cooking oil, these containers have been reused by generations of Ghanaians to gather water in the drought-prone country, and today they are even repurposed into chairs and beds. They are part of what Clottey calls the “daily architecture” of West African life.
“The yellow gallons represent struggle,” Clottey says, “but in the Ghanaian flag, yellow represents gold.” He explains that by manipulating the material, he changes its form and value, so the yellow color of the jerrycan, long synonymous with scarcity and lack, acquires new cultural and aesthetic associations. The lucent plastic material with its mottled hues becomes as poetically evocative as gold, and, in the context of Clottey’s art practice, just as precious a resource.
Clottey’s work is informed by weaving traditions from the Ashanti kingdom, which flourished in present-day Ghana until 1901, as well as by the compositional strategies of the early European avant-garde. Like the paintings of Klimt’s “Golden Phase,” Clottey’s Afrogallonism works are tone poems that combine a mosaic-like opulence with a scrupulous attention to craft. In Clottey’s work, however, beauty is only part of the story. The works in People and Place are not “pure abstractions” but reflections of a specific place—Accra, Ghana—and its people, using the language of abstraction to map the social dimensions of life in that city. Titles such as Campaign for Massive and Financial Revolution refer to political strategies and slogans employed by Ghanaian politicians, and Clottey’s use of color blocking reflects how residents in his own neighborhood use colored paint to demarcate space: “I live in Labadi, which is a suburb of Accra, where people express color as a means of communication—good and bad. Families having conflicts use color to divide their property.” In other pieces, such as Compassion Replaces Judgment, Clottey uses squares of negative space to suggest displacement and migration from one part of the city to another.
Rooted in the specificity of local experience, Clottey’s themes have a universal relevance, just as his sophisticated treatment of form, color, and materiality has a global appeal. Attuned to the sociological realities of life in Accra, and employing a visual grammar of stark contrasts and divisions, Clottey’s art nevertheless obtains states of beauty that seem to transcend those divisions. Without forgetting the life of struggle that the jerrycans have represented across generations, and without denying the deep social divisions still present in Accra and around the world, People and Place presents a vision of splendor from an imaginary future when even the humblest of materials may be reborn as gold.
Serge Attukwei Clottey (b. 1985, Accra, Ghana) works in a variety of media including performance, photography, video, painting, drawing, and sculpture. He attended the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Ghana before studying at the Escola Guinard University of Art in Brazil and has completed multiple fellowships abroad.
Clottey has had solo exhibitions at Simon Lee (London, 2023); Desert X (AlUla, Saudi Arabia, 2022); Brigade (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2022); Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco, 2020, 2018, and 2016); The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, 2019); Lorenzelli Arte (Milan, 2019); Fabrica Gallery (Brighton, 2019); Jane Lombard Gallery (New York, 2018); Gallery 1957 at Lawrie Shabibi Gallery (Dubai, 2018); Gallery 1957 (Accra, 2016); GNYP Gallery (Berlin, 2016); and Feuer/Mesler (New York, 2015).
Clottey has been included in group exhibitions at Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice, Italy, 2023); Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium (Vestfossen, Norway, 2019); Ever Gold [Projects] (San Francisco, 2018 and 2019); Kampnagel Hamburg (Hamburg, 2015); The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, 2015); University Museum of Contemporary Art (Amherst, MA, 2014); and the Goethe-Institut Ghana (Accra, 2011).
His work is in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, Kansas); the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (Marrakech, Morocco); the Nubuke Foundation (Accra, Ghana); the Seth Dei Foundation (Accra, Ghana); Modern Forms (UK); and The World Bank Collection (Washington D.C.), as well as a number of international private collections. Clottey lives and works in Accra, Ghana.
Logan R. Beitmen