Brandon Bortei-Doku
BA, Drawing, Painting & Printmaking
Statement
I have made three oil paintings merging African and Greek art concepts into famous figures on a canvas. Popular black figures like Labron James, Kobe Bryant and James Harden are painted as sculptures, displaying unique, authoritative facial expressions. My concept uses fine details to make references to the Ife sculptures of Nigeria, which were made in the 1600s, and were deemed too sophisticated by Western art historians for Africans to have made. In the 1900s, a German historian suggested the lost city of Atlantis washed ashore Nigeria to make the sculptures for the Africans. This was the same time that primitivism came about, being spearheaded by Picasso and other cubists.
I worked on 30 x 40 in. canvases, with nearly life size figures on a white background. I used a white background because as powerful as these expressions are to the viewer, just being black and being a minority, their voices may not be muted by the vacuum of white they are surrounded by making the work all the more powerful. I am using concepts of color, material and art history to elevate black figures and recast history.
Bio
Brandon Bortei-Doku was born in Woodbridge, Virginia on the 1st of August 1997, and spent his childhood in Accra, Ghana. Bortei-Doku has had a solo exhibition at Andersonville Galleria in Chicago in September 2019 and was part of the Annual Student Juried Art Show at the Loyola Lakeshore campus in January 2020. Bortei-Doku also had an Artists feature in the Loyola Phoenix newspaper, which spoke about the influence of his upbringing on his artwork. Bortei-Doku’s current body of work focuses on merging Greek and African art styles, causing a juxtaposition between the notions that Western art is highly sophisticated and African art is primitive, aided with the use of powerful black celebrities. Bortei-Doku works mainly with oil paint and acrylic paint, painting sculptures on canvas. Bortei-Doku hopes to continue to get more involved in the arts scene in Chicago and around the world, with his most recent month-long show held at Artspace8 at 900 N Michigan Ave in February 2020.