Amoako Boafo – the Ghanaian artist who has exhibited in space

Amoako Boafo, who has become a superstar in the art world, has been back home in Ghana, where one of his self-portraits is being exhibited. He told journalist Stephen Smith that he never intended to be an artist.

For all Amoako Boafo’s head-turning success, he is a reluctant interviewee. Not yet 40, he has had his canvases displayed in the galleries of the mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, who has hailed him as “the future of portraiture”.

Boafo says he used to vie with his friends to see who could do the best drawings of their favourite superheroes, but art simply wasn’t a career choice when he was growing up.

“All I know is that studying portraiture growing up, it never dawned on me that it was a form of art that artists of colour could reference and study,” he says of Gagosian’s high praise. “So to see that my work is regarded in that way, is a lot to process.”

His is a real-life rags to riches story. The Ghanaian used to scavenge for food in rubbish bins in his hometown of Accra to support his mother and grandmother. Now his portraits of black subjects, often painted with his fingertips, can command up to seven figures at auction.

He has emblazoned his work on to the fuselage of Jeff Bezos’s rocket ship, becoming one of the first artists to exhibit in space. It doesn’t come more ragged, it doesn’t get much richer.

Boafo’s the shooting star of a remarkable constellation of talent from West Africa. One of the striking features of this scene is how readily Boafo and his peers acknowledge each other’s ability and pool their resources and knowhow.

He recently visited Accra to check on the progress of an artists’ residency he supports at his own studio. He was also exhibiting at a group show in the Ghanaian capital.

The gallery is owned by Marwan Zahkem, a Lebanese-born developer and art impresario, who was one of the first people to buy Boafo’s work and exhibit it.

“What we are seeing in West Africa now is a movement like the Young British Artists in the 1980s, and Amoako is the Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin of this movement,” he told me.

Osei Bonsu, a curator of international art at London’s Tate Modern, put Boafo on the cover of his major new book African Art Now – or rather, he chose Boafo’s painting Yellow Dress, which sold at Christies last year for £675,000, more than double its estimate. The record price for Boafo’s work is currently £2.5m.

“In chronicling a generation of young people who perform their identities through the medium of the ‘selfie’, Boafo’s portraits figure a vital relationship between the historical traditions of portraiture and the social media age we are living in today,” Bonsu said.

As for the superstar himself, Boafo told me that he much prefers painting to talking about painting.

“At the end of the day, I paint because I love to create,” he said.

“As an artist, I think we are most stressed when we have to attend to tasks that pull us away from the studio. So for me activities which are not painting, I won’t say I’m stressed about, but are less exciting – unless it’s tennis!”