Kobina Nyarko: The Black Stars of Ghana - Art District

Kobina Nyarko"The Black Stars of Ghana - Art District" is a weekly video interview series that aims to let viewers experience the depth, vibrancy, beauty, vision and diversity of contemporary art produced on the African continent.
The Black Stars of Ghana - Art District was conceived and shot by Artfacts.Net PR Director Safia Dickersbach via her production and curatorial platform SHOWCASE in response to the current situation in the international art market. What we call the "international art market" is in reality an area covering only the United States and Western Europe. The global art scene’s Western-dominated perspective and mechanisms make it difficult for artists from Africa to receive the attention they deserve.The first series focuses on artists from Ghana. For the background to the series, please read our interview withSafia.
In this week's episode, Safia Dickersbach talks to Kobina Nyarko, one of Ghana's premier young contemporary artists.
For Kobina Nyarko it is still a mystery how the symbolism of shoaling fish became the predominant theme in his work. As he recalls, while we converse on the occasion of one his exhibitions at the Golden Tulip hotel in Legion village, Accra, Ghana, the idea came to him in a flash of inspiration sometime in 1998. Since then fish of different shapes, sizes, colours and movements have determined the contents of his paintings.
Kobina became convinced of the merit of his new idea when he saw the people’s reaction. He hung the first of these paintings in a restaurant and it sold immediately. Someone who’d seen the painting and wanted to buy it turned up as it was being taken away a week later, having been bought by somebody else. The first guy went in search of Kobina to ask him to paint another one, and that’s how the commissions started coming in. That was when Kobina knew the theme would become his focal point. Nowadays, Kobina paints colourful, swirling shoals of fish in such a way that the compositions are reminiscent of abstract expressionism.Lost info, Oil on Canvas, 76 cm x 102 cm, 2005
Kobina, born in 1972, studied Industrial Art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, from which he graduated in 2003. While studying, he noticed that the friends who had introduced him to painting were no longer painting. They weren’t making any money from it, they told him. With this in mind, Kobina decided to concentrate on his artistic work and be patient in making a name for himself. Perhaps then he’d make a living from painting. And that’s pretty much what happened.
Lost info, Acrylic on Canvas, 89 cm x 102 cm, 2006
On a regular workday, Kobina Nyarko works about 3 and 6 hours on a painting, but it takes up to a year to finish a single painting. It takes a month just to fix all the fishes' eyes, the numerous characteristic dots, and the eyes are clearly important to him as he does not allow a painting to be publicly displayed until all the fish in a painting have eyes. This obsession with giving sight to the last few blind fish never leaves.Lost Info, Acrylic on Canvas, 102 cm x 102 cm, 2007
Kobina doesn’t know how many fish are in any of the shoals he paints. He’s tried on occasion to count them, but they are so many and fill so much of the canvas that he just loses track in the swirl.
For Kobina, art is the power of the mind transformed into something that can be seen on any medium. Art brings to life what we have not imagined before. As he describes it, his head is full of the joy of creation and of things that he has not yet brought to life. He feels joy when he paints and turns some of the ideas into reality.  Lost Info, Oil on Canvas, 89 cm x 102 cm, 2007

Asked whether he considers himself an African painter, Kobina Nyarko says that in his view the times when there were reasons for people to attribute artists to the region from which they come are over. His ideas are not limited or related to any specific region on the planet. Shoaling fish are everywhere. And while he is an artist from Africa, and based in Africa, that doesn’t mean his paintings need to be full of things that you can only see on the African continent. Instead his paintings hint at address issues of global relevance, such as environmental pollution and human intervention in nature. The ocean connects the people worldwide. What happens in the waters of the world affects the shores of the African continent and what happens in the waters in and around Africa can affect coasts all over the globe.

Our Turn, Oil on Canvas, 102 cm x 127 cm, 2005Save the Sea Series, Oil on Canvas, 25 cm x 30 cm, 2007
3) Gabriel Eklou
Gabriel Eklou french version2) Ablade Glover1) Wiz Kudowor
For more contemporary artist from Africa, please visit my virtual gallery and enjoy!