Hair legacy V

SERGE ATTUKWEI CLOTTEY (B. 1985)  

Hair Legacy V  

acrylic and charcoal on paper in frame  

framed: 38 x 38 inches (96.5 x 96.5 cm)  

Executed 2020.

PROVENANCE:  

Private collection, New York

EXHIBITED:  

London, Gallery 1957, Serge Attukwei Clottey 'DISTINCTIVE GESTURES,' August-September, 2021.

NOTES:  

Born in 1985 in Accra, Ghana, Serge Attukwei Clottey is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, performance, sculpture, photography, and drawing. A graduate of the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra, Clottey has become internationally recognized for works that interrogate themes of migration, identity, environmental precarity, and systems of global exchange. Central to his practice is his concept of “Afrogallonism,” through which he transforms found yellow oil containers into large-scale sculptural compositions that address the circulation of goods, bodies, and histories throughout contemporary Africa and beyond. Across media, Clottey’s work remains deeply rooted in the textures and rhythms of everyday life in Ghana while engaging broader conversations surrounding memory, labor, and postcolonial experience.

Executed in 2020, Hair Legacy V reflects the artist’s sustained engagement with portraiture as a site of cultural inheritance and personal history. Rendered in acrylic and charcoal on paper, the composition possesses an immediacy and emotional intensity that distinguishes Clottey’s works on paper. Here, the artist uses bold gestural marks and layered surfaces to construct a fragmented visage in which hair becomes both formal device and symbolic language. More than an aesthetic feature, hair functions as an archive of ancestry, identity, and communal belonging—an enduring marker of Black self-fashioning across generations and geographies.

The work’s tactile surface and expressive linearity reveal Clottey’s instinctive approach to materiality. Sweeping passages of charcoal intersect with areas of saturated acrylic, producing a dynamic interplay between opacity and transparency, structure and improvisation. The composition oscillates between figuration and abstraction, allowing the subject to emerge gradually through accumulations of mark and gesture. In this way, Hair Legacy V embodies the artist’s broader interest in transformation and reconstruction, themes that recur throughout his practice regardless of medium.

Clottey’s work has been exhibited extensively across Africa, Europe, and the United States, including presentations at the Brighton Festival, the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and Gallery 1957 in Accra and London. In 2019, he was included in Ghana’s inaugural pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, a landmark exhibition that brought renewed international attention to contemporary Ghanaian art. His works are held in significant public and private collections worldwide. Hair Legacy V was exhibited in DISTINCTIVE GESTURES at Gallery 1957 in 2021.