Mieyoshi's Hold

CONRAD EGYIR (B. 1989)  

Mieyoshi's Hold  

signed 'Conrad Egyir' (on the reverse)  

oil and acrylic on mounted wood on canvas  

46 x 46 inches (116.8 x 116.8 cm)  

Executed in 2020.

PROVENANCE:  

Private collection, New York

NOTES:  

Born in 1989 in Ghana, Conrad Egyir is a contemporary artist whose vibrant figurative paintings investigate themes of migration, identity, spirituality, and diasporic memory. After studying painting and sculpture at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, he later received an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Now based in the United States, Egyir has developed a distinctive visual language that merges portraiture, symbolism, and abstraction through densely layered compositions saturated with color and narrative detail. Drawing upon West African folklore, personal history, and contemporary social realities, his works construct richly symbolic worlds in which Black subjects occupy spaces of dignity, power, and celebration.

Mieyoshi’s Hold presents a Black woman with an expression of self-contained joy staged within a composition that borrows the graphic clarity of Pop while adopting a symbolist visual grammar. Working across oil, acrylic, and mounted wood, Egyir treats the picture plane as both image and object, producing a surface that carries an almost totemic charge. Color is pushed beyond naturalism into something vivid and emotionally heightened, insisting upon celebration rather than mere description. The resulting composition radiates a sense of emotional and psychological abundance.

Egyir’s subjects possess a striking sense of regality, their presence reinforced through compositions dense with symbolic references rooted in West African storytelling and diasporic consciousness. In Mieyoshi’s Hold, the figure functions simultaneously as an individual portrait and as a broader meditation on Black womanhood, rendered with a grandeur and seriousness historically denied to such subjects within Western art history. The artist’s layered iconography and carefully orchestrated palette transform the portrait into a space of affirmation, resilience, and cultural memory. Through this synthesis of symbolism and figuration, Egyir reshapes the conventions of contemporary portraiture from within.

Egyir’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, Europe, and West Africa. His paintings are held in prominent institutional collections including the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, and the Rennie Collection in Vancouver. His rapidly growing institutional recognition reflects the depth and urgency of a practice that continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary diasporic portraiture.