George Afedzi Hughes

“George Afedzi Hughes”

By Prah, Elizabeth and Akoi-Jackson, Bernard, New Perspectives: Contemporary Art from Ghana

Hughes’s work attends to the history of colonialism and its current ramifications, highlighting contemporary global conflicts. In today’s informational age, global occurrences of violence reach us instantaneously, transmitting fear and unease. Hughes’s work interprets the spectacle of news, history and social engagement by borrowing imagery from global popular culture, such as sports and ritual.

On the artist’s work

‘George Afedzi Hughes’s drawings, paintings and assemblages explore shared narratives that cut across racial differences and highlight the connection of contemporary global conflicts to colonial history. Using humour and metaphor, the series Identity, Power, and Reconciliation, juxtaposes personal experiences, historical tropes and pop culture references in ways that address the complex and nuanced issue of racial reconciliation. Hughes grounds his work in the history of colonialism, highlighting parallels between imperialism’s brutal past and contemporary global conflicts.’- Shirley Verrico, curator, Buffalo Arts Studio

‘Hughes is an internationally acclaimed painter and performance artist whose visually arresting paintings highlight parallels between the violence of colonialism and contemporary global encounters. Through an accessible prism of sports iconography, Hughes’s work interrogates postcolonial racial reconciliation and identity, and the tension between personal and historical narratives.’ -Pamela Newkirk PhD, Professor of Journalism, New York University

“George Hughes”

By Obiago, Sandra Mbanefo, A King’s Passion: A 21st-Century Patron of African Artists

…Hughes expresses himself through photography and paintings in acrylic, oil, and enamel on canvas. Occasionally, he creates a hybrid format with performance art to evoke the metaphorical by incorporating body art, music, sound, costumes, and ritual, with the intent to change realistic situations into memorable dramatizations. 

He posits that his work uses the history of colonialism as a basis to highlight parallels between colonialists’ brutal history and contemporary global conflicts. He revisits the harsh realities of colonialism and its ramifications through humor and metaphor by borrowing imagery from global popular culture such as sports. An example is his series ‘Fragments’, which explores the contingency between violence and reconciliation, and the possibilities of adapting from the tragic to the recreational.

“Life Points”                         

By Shirley Verrico, Curatorial Essay, Buffalo Arts Studio

George Afedzi Hughes’s drawings, paintings, and assemblages explore shared narratives that cut across racial differences and highlight the connection of contemporary global conflicts to colonial history. Using humor and metaphor, Identity, Power, and Reconciliation juxtaposes personal narratives, historical tropes, and pop culture references in ways that address the complex and nuanced issue of racial reconciliation. Hughes grounds his work in the history of colonialism, highlighting parallels between imperialism’s brutal past and contemporary global conflicts.

Hughes’s own identity is layered and complex. Born and raised in Ghana, Hughes identifies as Black, African, Ghanaian, Fante, and African American. Additionally, Hughes recognizes the identities projected onto him; immigrant, minority, and “other.” His artwork reflects this complexity through systematic yet accessible iconography. Many of the paintings feature fragmented barcodes, a ubiquitous part of today’s economy, which can represent data in a visual, machine-readable form. The barcode system was designed for efficiency, removing human error from much of the retail experience. Hughes layers barcodes into compositions that include references to sports and celebrities. In paintings such as Number 8 and Victory, Hughes’s figures are pressed against the picture plane and often fragmented to fit within the confines of the canvas. The barcodes are integrated into the compositions, remaining immediately recognizable due to their consistent verticality. Both his compositions and his symbols connect the treatment of athletes within international soccer to the enduring legacy of colonialism and the dehumanizing commodification of black and brown bodies.

Throughout all of Hughes’s work, he connects global and historical concerns to his own experiences. Hughes was an athlete himself and he continues to be an avid soccer fan. The barcode is also a deeply personal reference. During the first four years, Hughes lived in the US, he worked in a warehouse driving a forklift and scanning barcodes eight hours a day. It is easy to imagine how the collective hours of seeing and scanning these codes would leave a lasting imprint on his consciousness that continues to resurface in his work many years later.

Hughes investigates the evolution of postcolonial reconciliation through sports imagery as a civil contest contrasted with war and its fatal consequences. He draws parallels between colonial violence and contemporary global conflicts in his large-scale paintings including Yield (Fig. 1), which fills the entire gallery wall at 228 x 72 inches. Tanks roll over the landscape and a jet flies overhead dropping bombs from imagined mechanical arms. The chaos is amplified by a huge @ symbol placed in the center of an implied sky. On the bottom right of the huge canvas Hughes has painted “.com.” Together, these symbols point to the remote nature of contemporary warfare while leaving space for the viewer to complete the url and implicate the appropriate corporate entities both facilitating and profiting from the countless global conflicts.

The planes and tanks are also references to Hughes’s childhood. Recent sculptural installations incorporate fragments of wood, collage, toys, and text that are glued together. These free-form sculptures glean ideas from popular culture/media. The toy planes in Puzzle Pieces: Planes I-XI were purchased from a big box store in the US and are nearly identical to the ones Hughes played with as a boy in Ghana. The military equipment is also a reference to the repurposed army barracks that served as his studio while he was living and teaching in Oklahoma. These symbols serve as “life points,” connecting Hughes’s identity and his experiences over the years and across the globe.

Hughes and his work also speak to his own journey of reconciliation after a serious accident in 2017 left him largely paralyzed from the neck down. After years of intense physical therapy, Hughes has regained limited use of his arms and legs. Although he still requires skilled assistants in order to paint and teach, Hughes continues to be prolific. In his artist talk, Hughes notes, “We need to reconcile our personal histories, our memories, and our culture. I have had to reconcile the trauma of my accident and my lack of mobility. You have to continue to contribute to society despite obstacles. For me, this requires artistic humor and metaphor.”

“The Unstoppable George Hughes, or: How to Make a Western”                         

By M. Delmonico Connoly, Cornelia Magazine

You have to understand, you can’t stop George Hughes. Talk to someone who knows him, and you’ll start to get it, even secondhand. Tell someone you’re going to speak to him, and they’re excited for you.

Hughes’s paintings have that energy too. He hurls himself at the canvas as a proxy for the immovable forces in our world — the colonial system of things, the ever-growing power of the commodity in our imaginations, the red fact of violence — piling innumerable efforts at the feet of these mountains. And you see them quiver.

Andy Krzystek, an artist who has made films with Hughes, put it this way, “George told me, ‘I moved into a house. The garage was twenty feet long. I couldn’t wait to make paintings that were nineteen- and-a-half feet long.’” What’s the limit of what’s possible? Do that.

Here’s another example. It starts at a party. Friends have a cowboy hat hanging on the wall, and — it’s a party — people take turns wearing it, acting the part. Someone suggests that Hughes, who is known for making performance videos, do a Western. The next day, someone not even at the party hears about all this and drops off a book about cowboys they found in a used bookstore. Over six months Hughes pulls together the costumes. Every Sunday he goes to the thrift store to look for hats. Someone loans a horse to the picture. When it comes time to shoot, fifteen of the forty people who said they would show up do. Some people stick it through. Others disappear. Hughes shoots some of it in Lockport, in Alma, in a bar in Buffalo where they only paid for the beer. The dialogue is improvised, some of the words are intelligible, sensible, but sometimes it’s just gibberish in the form of the American West. The person who could do the best accent became the star. It wasn’t planned, it just happened that way.

And so, Hughes made a Western.

“Being African, people never thought that I grew up experiencing Westerns. But I grew up watching Bonanza,” Hughes says

Bonanza was one of the longest running Westerns on US television. Week after week, for more than fourteen seasons, Ben Cartwright and his three sons by different deceased mothers tend to a thousand-square mile ranch called the Ponderosa, learning how to love each other and to love justice. It’s a kinder, gentler incarnation of the cowboy. Bonanza, in its own way, took on racism against Asian Americans, Native Americans, Black people, and war, but it’s still an odd touchpoint for an artist whose academic bio — for his role as an associate professor of painting at the University at Buffalo — speaks to his interest in the “residual effects of colonialism.”

In any case, the Cartwrights, on the tide of United States culture, spilled across the Atlantic to Ghana, where Hughes picked them up. Without a TV in the house, he’d go to a neighbor’s to watch a different world stream across the screen. He played “Cowboys and Indians,” too.

Hughes prods at something here about who has the right to a myth, who gets to play in it. Maybe there’s a little cowboy bravura in just laying claim to the territory.

Hughes trained at Kwame Nkrumah University, enrolling in a master’s program in arts education. Many of his peers looked forward to teaching careers. But some, like Hughes, nursed the ambition to become working artists and pursued the knowledge of what that would entail. They studied not just the making of things but also how to survive a life of making things. The lives of famous artists, African and Western, became road maps. “We read about people who really suffered and that gave us some kind of consolation,” Hughes says. “We dug into Francis Bacon. We knew Kandinsky and the risks he took in pure abstraction.”

Because easel painting was originally a Western import, some in Hughes’s cohort rejected it entirely. But distilling symbolic form from local traditions was no easier path for city kids (there are at least seventy- five distinct language groups in Ghana alone). Those who did embrace easel painting, like Hughes, had to discover their own paths forward in a foreign idiom.

Picasso was one of their heroes. “Our training took from traditional African sculptural concepts, blended with Western ideas, and that's the reason we love Picasso, because he took inspiration from African sculpture and also, of course, took inspiration from Cézanne and also Iberian art.”

Hughes had a map, and a goal, and he was prepared to suffer: “If you go for broke, and you’re prolific . . .”

At twenty-eight, he went to Europe for two years. At thirty-two, he came to the United States.

“I came here as an adult,” Hughes says. “When I came, I already had a master's degree. My accent was made, my thoughts were made. I knew my bearings, mentally, and then I had to start from scratch.”

In London, he washed dishes, washed cars. Hughes’s first job in the United States was in a dairy warehouse. “You can imagine coming from the tropics and being thrown in a big fridge.” He wore a winter jacket and a hat every day.

Hughes made friends with guys much younger than him, in their twenties, some eighteen and nineteen, who helped initiate him into the system. Some of them didn’t have cars, so Hughes would pick them up and drop them off, receiving an orientation to life in the United States in return. George remembers the mechanics who helped keep his wayward ’83 Chevy on the road particularly fondly.

But work in the dairy was killing him. A truck driver who delivered milk from Canada noticed his evident despair one day. Hughes was thinking of quitting. He had a newborn daughter. The equation had changed, and he would need to pick up more work. The driver told him not to quit yet: he should have a job while looking for a better job. So Hughes picked up work for UPS. He’d work an eight-hour day at the dairy, get home to his family, and then at 2 am go and unload trucks. And he painted. If you’re prolific . . .

A friend told him about a company hiring a forklift driver, and somehow that was enough of a break. “The forklift was an upgrade,” Hughes says. He quit UPS, he quit the dairy, and for eight hours a day for the next four-and-a-half years, he scanned UPCs in a big warehouse in Toledo, Ohio. “And the more you scan, the more you see your name on the board as being a great worker. Everything is for sale. Everything has a label.”

The UPCs infect his work. The characteristic line patterns subsume faces and lifeforms, cutting up flesh like the blades of a mandoline.

Hughes started taking classes toward an MFA, wanting eventually to teach. His boss helped accommodate his coursework schedule, and Hughes made use of every available minute. “I would do my drawing practice in the van.” After class finished, he’d drive to the warehouse, and with less than an hour before his shift started, he’d draw. The van became a mobile studio: it had a drawing board, his portfolio, and he produced. He kept another studio — not on wheels — for painting: an entire floor of a building (twenty bathrooms), for which he bartered a couple of completed works to the landlord each year.

Eventually, Hughes finished his MFA while working as an adjunct professor on top of the warehouse gig. He got his first full-time academic job in 2001 at the University of Oklahoma. “For the first time, I only had one full-time job. It was like paradise.”

And with the break from the physical labor of his blue-collar jobs, he started working out ambitiously. You get the sense Hughes almost needs to exhaust himself to get any sleep. Hughes is, by the way, massively tall, and he must have carried his workout regime with him to the University at Buffalo (a former student reports that he looked like Hercules).

It helped. A 2017 accident left him nearly paralyzed. He was never supposed to walk again. Over the pandemic, he bought a treadmill. His paintings of flesh and violence feel uncanny here. Carcasses and meat populated a 2006 show at Hallwalls, Social Predation. Just last year, Albright- Knox Northland showed a work from his Ohio years: a twisted abstraction of a yellow car partially obscured by a plastic baseball bat hung nakedly over the canvas from a piece of rope. Hughes’s work is raw in its sense for the vulnerability of bodies.

He's painting again. Working, in part, with assistants to mix paint and cover certain limited areas.

“It's been hard,” Hughes says, “but I think that it's improved. It's gotten better because I have to reconcile my situation with my symptoms. I have to live with it, and I have to figure out how to cope with it.”

It’s changed his style, he feels, but for the better. Before the injury, Hughes veered between hard- edge painting and an almost explosive use of paint. Since the injury, he’s tended much more toward hard-edged works with areas of flat color — an idiom much more demanding of his motor skills than broader, expressive gestures.

“You’d think I would go explosive, because it's easier to hide.” Moreover, painters often “paint badly” on purpose, showing their sophistication by self- consciously letting virtuosity come and go like any other element in the work. Hughes, however, states, “I don't want my disability to influence the way I think. I would rather allow the psychology of my impairment — but not the physicality of it — to be vested in the work.”

Hughes wants his mind, not his body, to be in control of the choices that appear in his work, but one also gets the impression that whatever was most challenging for a painter to do, Hughes would do that. If it was harder to paint a banana than an apple, he would paint the banana.

“Painting is a mysterious thing,” Hughes says. “Sometimes the painting that looks like it took forever to paint actually took less time, and sometimes some paintings that look so simple, I suffered more from painting them.” Some of his paintings have date ranges like “2008–2022”: shorthand for something that he did in 2008, kept around in the studio for a few years, moved to the basement for storage, forgot for years, and then finally brought out again. “I figured out the problem,” Hughes said, explaining the grid lines he had just added to a work for his recent exhibition at Buffalo Arts Studio, Identity, Power, and Reconciliation. Those grid lines came out of a work, Two Heads and a Fish, which features an actual metal grate. Before appearing in last year’s Northland group show, that work had been sitting in Hughes’s basement for decades. His solution was years in the making.

Hughes notes that he did real research for his Western. Contra myth and film, in the post–Civil War era one in four cowboys in the United States West was Black, another third were estimated to have been Mexican. They were rarely instigators of violence. The job was physically grueling, often literally backbreaking, and most cowboys retired by the time they were in their mid-twenties.

Imagine never stopping.

“Of Patterns and Markets: the Making and Unmaking of Asafo Flags”

By Silvia Forni, Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture

Beyond the multiple theses and dissertations produced in over 20 years by students in many Ghanaian universities, one poignant example is the asafo-inspired work of painter George Afedzi Hughes (b. 1962). Hughes is an academically trained painter with a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree form the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana’s most prestigious art institution, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Hughes’s paintings are allegorical, textured, and quite literally visceral, with animal parts, human limbs, and skeletons juxtaposed with weapons and mechanical objects.

Contrast and juxtapositions are a recurrent theme in the artist’s work: “I do a lot of divergent associations bringing two entirely different things together”. Hughes’s canvases express tension, violences, and the messiness of the human condition. His work is layered with personal references and reflection on broader societal and historical conditions ranging from colonialism to contemporary conflicts and ecological disasters. As a Ghanaian who has lived in Europe and now in the United States, his autobiographical and artistic references reflect his international experience. There is nothing particularly Ghanaian or African about Hughes’s work, yet such cultural references do emerge at times, for example, “I speak English with a Ghanaian accent, and sometimes I paint with a Ghanaian accent”.

Within the very personal selection of visual references and tropes in Hughes’s paintings, iconic images that refer to the artist’s transnational life trajectory are at times combined with images or concepts that refer quite directly to communication patterns of his country of origin. That said, Hughes’s interest in asafo flags did not originate from his experience of seeing the flags in performance as he was growing up; rather, it was the result of his engagement with the material, through the mediation of Adler’s book and postcards.The first three paintings he made in this format were in response to a request by Maruska Svasek in 2008. At the time, investigating how contemporary artists engage with traditional imagery through different media. More recently, in 2015, Hughes made two more paintings with asafo references, which were acquired by the Royal Ontario Museum for the exhibition Art, Honour, and Ridicule: Asafo Flags from Southern Ghana. In the more recent paintings, Hughes sought to engage the potentially contentious character of traditional flags and probe the semantic potential of working with the asafo narrative format. Studying the flags and engaging with the scholarship on these materials was for Hughes an opportunity to think through a somewhat novel visual format and shape his vision, inspiration, and political concerns through it (G. Hughes, personal communication, December 7, 2015).

Quite fitting as references to “traditional” artworks informed by the history of contact, trade, and exploitation, in this recent work Hughes chose to reflect explicitly on the history and lasting consequences of colonialism.The paintings, like much of his other work (but also in keeping with the narrative dimension of asafo flags), are rife with tension and are a reflection on the uneven and unequal struggle between the inhabitants of the Gold Coast and the British for wealth and natural resources. In “Gold Pyramid” (Fig 1), the burning bouquet of flowers offered but the European to the Akan symbolizes the ideological pretense of the “white man’s burden,” which disguised the predatory violence of colonial interactions with a veneer of civilizing polite-ness. The unevenly armed contestants embody the structural inequality of the colonial encounter and its lasting consequence on postcolonial international relationships. “Pruning Cycle” (Fig 2) pushes the reflection to a further level of complexity. A large baobab with a human head as its leaves represents humanity: a clear reference to a common African origin, and the torso-less crow standing on a dry branch emerging from the Ghanaian flag suggests the irrecoverable loss and spoliation of colonialism. The soldier in a red coat standing on arrows attempts the impossible pruning of the tree with a weapon that is both deadly and useless. The Ghanaian king, in his full regalia, appears at once imposing, majestic, and static. Hughes’s intellectual and emotional approach to asafo flags reflects a sophisticated and personal reading of the meaning and narrative potential of this art form.

The novel and generative work of George Afedzi Hughes is just one of the many examples of the potentially inspiring and transformative value of an engagement with the visual and semantic layers of asafo flags. Ultimately, in Hughes’s case as in that of many other artists that have quoted this material in their work, this would not have happened were it not for the aggressively international exhibition and publication operation conducted by Peter Adler. Despite the undeniable financial gain benefitting the collector, the increase in price of asafo flags on the African art market is not the only form of value that was affected by this operation. Though not particularly original in content and limited from the scholarly point of view, its broad circulation certainly contributed to adding important layers of value and meaning to the biography of these artworks (Kopitoff, 1986), not only in the context of museums and exhibitions but also in relation to scholarship and new creative ideas.”

“The Present is Past, the Past is Present”

George Afedzi Hughes in Conversation with ArtFile Magazine’s AM DeBrincat

The art of George Afedzi Hughes uses the history of colonialism to draw parallels between colonialism’s brutal history and contemporary global conflicts. Hughes' work examines how today’s technology makes global occurrences of violence reverberate around the world instantaneously, and his work interprets news, history, and social engagement into visual form by appropriating imagery from popular culture, including sports, music, and ritual. George Afedzi Hughes' paintings, performances, and installations have been shown throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and the United States. Born in Ghana, he now resides in New York State. In conjunction with his recent solo show at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, ArtFile Magazine caught up with Hughes to talk about his multifaceted, fascinating work.

Tell us about your work.

My work draws parallels between colonial violence and contemporary global conflicts. I use painting, poetry and performance art as disciplines of exploration. 

What themes are central to your work? How do these themes play out in individual pieces or your body of work as a whole?

I investigate the evolution of postcolonial reconciliation through sports imagery as a civil contest, contrasted with war and its fatal consequences. Metaphors with predatory animals, armaments, and wrecked vehicles form a body of work that reference the use of force to settle geo-political conflicts. Paintings of soccer players with anatomical body parts address injuries that athletes endure. I am also interested in the celebrity status of athletes, their opulence, vulnerabilities and notoriety. For example the soccer field painting entitled “Banana Kick, Dani Alves citation” addresses incidents where black soccer players are subjected to acts of racism on the field of play.

My performances incorporate influences of traditional African rituals, body art, and theater. 

Recent sculptural installations incorporate fragments of wood, collage, toys and text that are glued together. These free-form sculptures glean ideas from popular culture/media. These sculptures can be displayed individually, or in groups.

You work across different genres, creating paintings, sculptural works, and performance. Can you tell us about your approach to these different mediums? What does each give you, and how do you decide if a certain idea should be a sculpture, painting, or performance?

Trained as a painter I often work in two-dimensions. However, certain concepts develop beyond two-dimensions, either by the attraction of materiality or found objects. My performance art concepts present themselves mentally as moving human figures in space interacting with objects. Most of my ideas first appear ‘in my mind’s eye’, before being processed on a conscious level: allowing the most dominant ideas to prevail.

What do you hope that an audience brings to an experience of your work, and what do you hope they take away with them?

I hope audiences would bring to my work creative curiosity, and engagement. I hope they would leave visually and intellectually transformed. 

How do you title your work? For you, what is the connection between language and art?

Titles come to me after the work is created. Titles can reference the subject matter, the process, or a remote phenomenon hinted in the work. The connection between language and art is very important to me. The fragmentary approach to language in my poetry is similar to the way I treat imagery in the other genres of my practice. However each area of my practice exists independently and I do not translate or illustrate my poetry with my fine art or vice versa.

In addition to being an internationally recognized artist, you have also been an art professor for many decades. How does teaching intersect with your studio work? Has the experience of teaching art influenced your own approach to art-making over the years?

I am fortunate that I enjoy working with young artists and engaging with their energy. I try to schedule my studio practice around my teaching, since the latter is a fixed routine. Teaching has allowed me to break down systematically the processes I use in my own work in order to share such methods with students without diminishing their own idiosyncrasies. Teaching art has exposed me to a wide variety of past and current art movements. This translates to me as a way of affirming one’s own trajectory and of developing work strategies that might not be popular, but necessary.  

How does location factor into your work?

Location is important in relation to culture, climate, weather and studio space. Personally, new environments inspire different work. Extreme weather conditions might not be encouraging, however they can bring a certain kind of intensity to the work at hand. I found out years ago how extreme weather conditions such as unheated studios yielded work I would not have created in a comfortable studio setting.  

If you had to encapsulate your artistic practice in three words or phrases, what would they be?

Fragmented imaginary states.

Please ask yourself a question that feels fundamentally important to your artistic practice, and answer it.

Why is art-making necessary?

There are several reasons why we make art. One of the most important reasons relevant to my work is the desire and responsibility to aesthetically dissect experiences in search of meaning, to probe reality, explore and play with form/language and to stretch the imagination beyond the known. 

I’m always curious about why people become artists. Have you always known you wanted to be an artist? Were there other career paths you wanted to follow in addition to art? What led you down this path?

As early as kindergarten my desire and ability to draw was encouraged first by my parents and then by my teachers. I remember, in high school, art had been recommended to me as a career at a special meeting held between the art teacher, the Principal and myself. However, as I was entering university my parents and siblings with good intentions, discouraged me from becoming a professional artist. They thought it was not a respected profession. 

“George Hughes: The Politics of Identity at Buffalo Arts Studio”

By Dana Tyrell, Buffalo Rising

Within portraiture, historic representations of people of color have been assigned to stultifying presences within the frame; at the edge and never the center. Be it as the servant, the slave, or the slain, representations of black bodies, specifically, have been in roles of subjugation. It becomes vital to see, then, how artists such as George Afedzi Hughes work to both confront this malignant history within their own art practice, as well as attempt to move beyond it.

A survey of Hughes’ paintings spanning the length of the twenty-first century (up to this point) is on view now at Buffalo Arts Studio in a rare double-gallery exhibit titled The Politics of Identity. Hughes is a Ghanaian-born American working in the visual and performing arts, while also operating within the world of academia, and his most recent work serves as a keyhole which glances upon how the artist grapples with his manifold, and potentially fraught, identity politics.

Within the first gallery of Buffalo Arts Studio is Hughes’ most recent body of work. Spanning the last couple of years, these tight, illustrative and traditionally constructed paintings speak to the thesis of the entire exhibit, which becomes a self- portrait of the artist as a hybrid. The locus of a singular identity within Hughes’ artwork becomes challenging since each of the figures represented therein are by turns effaced, flattened, decapitated, amputated and presented within the same visual plane as skeletal schematics. This blunting of the body speaks to the many ways in which representations of African-ness is both possible and eschewed within portraiture, but it also speaks to the limits of bodies and their allotted agency within a visual plane.

The second gallery – showcasing Hughes’ work from the early aughts – is more circumspect in both how it depicts landmarks of identity and how they are in turn picked apart. These canvases, which are panoramic in their length; un- stretched with raw edges, they sag under their own accumulative weight. This series of paintings is more outwardly violent, calling to mind the wrath Francis Bacon would inflict upon a surface through his brushstrokes, as well as narratively driven, recalling the best of Rauschenberg’s work from the 1950s and 60s, with their collaged, worked over surfaces and constituent detritus.

These paintings present a more reflective Hughes, who imbues the paintings with what may be images of his family, as well as signs and symbols which point toward the platonic ideal of belonging, while also reconciling his ancestral and genealogical truths. These paintings work in a register closer toward archaeology, than the architectural and cool paintings of the previous gallery. They gesticulate – wildly, eagerly, emphatically – toward bodies realized, forgotten and subsumed within the mechanizations of time.

“Soccer meets colonialism in George Afedzi Hughes’ paintings at BAS”

By Colin Dabkowski, Buffalo News

Each painting by the Ghanaian artist George Afedzu Hughes, an Associate Professor of Painting at the University at Buffalo, is a series of worlds within worlds. 

His canvases from the early 2000s, now spread across the walls of Buffalo Arts Studio, contain bloody patchworks of inscrutable terrors: Human skulls and cubist faces share space with canine heads, pasted photographs or news clippings. A British redcoat with a severed head anchors on canvas, that is scrawled with vague words and phrases hinting at the continued hole of colonialism over African lives and traditions. 

By contrast, the artist’s more recent work, also on view in the Buffalo Arts Studio show “George Hughes: the Politics of Identity”, feel about 100 degrees cooler. They feature graphic portrayals of Ghanaian soccer players, accented by imagery of human anatomy, African geography and references to the excessive wealth those players amass. 

For Hughes, the transition from bloody colors and severed heads to cooler tones and seemingly more polite symbols comes from the subject: not the bloodshed of colonialism, but it's more subtle effects. 

“When I paint, sometimes I want the paint itself to emulate the theme that I'm trying to render, or the content,” Hughes said. “So the explosive paintings usually deal with violence. The recent ones are more calculated, because wealthy people don’t just become wealthy by accident. Everything is calculated.”

Soccer seemed a natural subject for Hughes, who grew up like many in Ghana obsessed with the sport. 

“We all played soccer.” he said.”In the afternoon and after school, we would literally go out and find teams to play with. And our parents did not monitor our play time the way it’s done in the states.”

Hughes’s childhood interest in soccer continues today, but his concerns about it have changed. His paintings, if obliquely, explore the way Ghanaian players are recruited and paid by the lucrative European leagues. But when those players return to play for their home country in the World Cup, Hughes notes, they rarely perform as well because of poorly organized teams with fewer resources than their European rivals. His paintings, in some way, are an attempt to capture and comment on this dichotomy. 

“Over the years I’ve realized that, especially in developing countries, the attitude toward soccer somehow reflects the way they govern,” Hughes said. “I also see soccer as the way generals who plan a battle, the coaches who plan a football game, there are certain tactics that they use. If you have a great team, and you have a bad coach, it’s hard to win.”

Some of Hughes’ paintings also more directly comment on racism in the soccer world, especially one uncharacteristically straightforward piece featuring a soccer ball sitting on a green field next to a half-peeled banana.

“There are times when the black players are kicking the ball, and someone will throw a banana onto the field,” he said. “So race issues, like being taunted by the spectators, also feature in my work.”

“Soccer ball as globe in ‘Fùtbol: The Beautiful Game’ at LACMA”

By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times

“...utopian facets of soccer, as well as some ugly ones — hooliganism, extreme nationalism, racist incidents, commercial exploitation — form the subtext of LACMA’s just-opened exhibition ‘Fútbol: The Beautiful Game.’ Curated by Sirmans and comprising some 50 works in painting, print-making, sculpture, photography and video by roughly 30 artists, it will run past the end of the 2014 World Cup, which takes place from mid-June to mid-July in Brazil… there are works that allude to the games darker side, including George Afedzi Hughes’ painting of a giant Adidas boot ominously paired with a silhouetted rifle and Lyle Ashton Harris’ photos of riot police squaring off with Italian fans.”

“New Exhibition at LACMA Devoted to The Beautiful Game’s Global Significance”

By Sophia Azeb, LACMA.org

Today the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s ‘Futbol: The Beautiful Game’ opens to the public. An exhibition curated by Franklin Sirmans, it is devoted to football’s global position as a “common human experience shared by spectators from many cultures,” and features contemporary and classic contributions of some 32 artists ruminating on the sports’s political, social, and economic significance…

Undergirding the devotion and love of the game, of course, is the incredible commodification of football’s most basic elements. Africa (the country) is largely represented by Ghana’s George Afedzi Hughes, who joins several other artists in addressing the economic power, and often violence, endemic to the sport. In ‘Masked Goalkeeper,” (Fig. 1) from his ‘Layers’ project, the goalie’s internal organs reveal the meat -and money- that the bodies of footballers are composed of and produce. Viewers are reminded that these bodies are also products, and products that may go bad at any moment. Additionally, ‘Made in the Colonies’ (2008-11) (Fig. 2)  and ‘Parallel’ (Fig. 3) (2009-11) -- the latter an Adidas cleat above the silhouette of a sniper rifle- speak to the function of football in (post)colonial nations as a potentially reconciliatory -though never quite– practice.

“Fútbol: The Beautiful Game” Artist List

Adel Abdessmed

George Afedzi Hughes

Gustavo Artigas

Chris Beas

Mark Bradford

Miguel Calderon

Mary Ellen Carroll

Carolyn Castaño

Petra Cortright

Stephen Dean

Dario Escobar

Leo Fitzmaurice

Generic Art Solutions

Douglas Gordon

Andreas Gursky

Hassan Hajjaj

Lyle Ashton Harris

Satch Hoyt

Nelson Leirner

Nery Gabriel Lemus

Alon Levin

Amitis Motevalli

Antoni Muntadas

Oscar Murillo

Philippe Parreno

Paul Pfeiffer

Robin Rhode

Ana Serrano

Dewey Tafoya

Andy Warhol

Wendy White

Kehinde Wiley

“Museum and Gallery Listings”

From Art & Design, The New York Times

George Afedzi Hughes’ ‘Layers’ closes on Saturday. Born in Ghana and living in the United States since 1994, George Afedzi Hughes is a multitasking artist, working as poet, performer and painter. There's a sense of all these disciplines working together in the collage-style paintings in this substantial show, which insert single words and Twitter-style abbreviations among images of soccer players, soldiers and animals. Silvery figures float like rising souls above a battered landscape made from cutout high school yearbook portraits. Gold is everywhere in the paintings: in the sunburst of a lion's mane, in a dollar sign, in a disembodied brain. Values, like objects, seem to be in violent motion. Skoto Gallery.

“George Afedzi Hughes. Collisions”

From AGENDA, Wall Street International

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Collisions, an exhibition of recent paintings by the Ghanaian-born artist George Afedzi Hughes. This will be his second solo show at the gallery. The reception is Thursday, November 21st, 6-8 pm, and the artist will be present.

George Afedzi Hughes’s recent work uses art as a tool for cultural provocation by challenging contemporary systems of order and engaging notions of violence, including the consequences of misused power. He utilizes creative processes that reactivate imagery through a variety of media in which elements from diverse sources such as war machinery, military uniforms with epaulettes, automobiles, colonial/historical references are charged with meaning.

A specter of violence and raw power emanate from the pictures in this exhibition, and for the artist, the use of violent narratives is a civil necessity if the objective is to speak against violence. There is a visual resonance in his work that encourages us to probe into the nature of the world we live in. The show entreats us to redefine interpersonal relations, revealing truths about both predatory forces and victims, as well as eschew society’s permanent state of siege and man’s readiness to use violence in all its ramifications. 

George Afedzi Hughes’s work is dense with visual complexity that reflects an awareness of a vast array of both formal and inherited traditions. He combines strong compositional qualities, with unique simultaneous figuration and abstraction. The new works reveal an acute awareness of the diversity, contradictions and complexity of modern society as he explores the tension between contained pictorial energy and boundless space.”

“Collisions”

Artnet.com

Pencil in this fantastic gallery opening: Ghanaian-born artist George Afedzi Hughes’ new show is being feted with an opening reception at New York's Skoto Gallery tomorrow night, from 6-8 pm.

Hughes’s recent work uses art as a tool for cultural provocation by challenging contemporary systems of order and violence, including the consequences of misused power. The show entreats us to redefine interpersonal relations, revealing truths about both predatory forces and victimes, as well as eschew society’s permanent state of siege and man’s readiness to use violence in all its ramifications.”

“Moving Into Space: Football and Art in West Africa”

National Football Museum

...In “Moving Into Space: Football and Art in West Africa, eleven contemporary artists use footfall to explore wider social issues including those of globalisation and trade, gender relationships, corruption and violence…George Afedzi Hughes’s (Ghana) paintings address power relations and the use of violence to solve geo-political conflicts, together with the way globalised communications bring such violence to us at the touch of a button. While few of the artists venture to state that football or art can affect whole societies rather than changing the lives of individuals who happen to make their mark in the game, they imply in these works that football will remain a powerful instrument for conveying messages about society.

“George Hughes: ‘Social Predation’”

By John Massier, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center

In George Hughes’ recent series of paintings, predators and prey are the dominant characters in a series of expressive vignettes that underscore notions of power relationships and the implied violence within these relationships. Hughes operates in multiple directions at once–from a spontaneous-seeming field of chaos where images abruptly collide to a more concise depiction that is stripped-down, blunt, and emphatic. Throughout, Hughes is recognizing violent impulses while using specific gestures to undermine the violence and reveal its essential absurdity. 

Two flies copulating on a bed in the work “Crown Royal” (Fig. 1)  is a salient case-in-point. A strangely unexpected and violent image, it is also immediately revealed as miniscule and ridiculous, fueled solely by a fluorescent spray of alcohol. Hughs reduces the participants to insignificance, draining the act of any implied or potential violence. 

It’s a method Hughes utilizes repeatedly, particularly when using animal imagery, where the predator/prey relationship can be acutely rendered. In Hughes’ world, animals typically viewed as predatory– eagles, pit bulls– are presented as insidious mutations, which one might anticipate would accentuate the threat they represent. But for Hughes, these mutated versions dissipate the threat level of these icons.

As indicated by a couple of his titles, these renditions are “figmentations,” a beautiful non-word that cobbles together “figment,” “imagination,” and (since we’re talking painting) “pigmentation.” “Figmentation 2” (Fig. 2) adroitly illustrates Hughes’ dismantling of a presumed threat. The painting appears to be all studly virility, a pit bull/handgun so masculine it has two triggers, both poised and ready for action. Hovering over a ground of deep, reflective red, it looks ominous and powerful. Yet, closer inspection reveals that its one visible eye is dead and lifeless, despite its tough dog demeanor, and it takes nothing more than the flimsiest air mask to serve as a muzzle. In other words, it is all posture. 

Figmentation 1 (Fig. 3) contains more elements, but the same formal maneuvering is taking place. An oversized and imposing gun form extends from the front of an animal, apparently so powerful that it must be contained by an equally-imposing length of chain. But Hughes is operating in the mirror images in this painting. The implication is of a two-faced masculinity. The gun-beast’s hindquarters, as seen in the small mirror, are puny. In the foreground, we see the hindquartered beast more clearly, a piggish lump of dissected masculinity, sausage-like banana penis jutting out, erect but ridiculous. Accentuating its piggish aspect, Hughes has added an entrail-like patterning to the walls, a pasty allusion to intestines and innards. Ultimately, Hughes is suggesting that, no matter the size of your gun barrel, you’re still just a piece of meat.

The implicit violence of power relationships is real to Hughes, but in no way intimidating. Time and again, he sees this threat of violence as just so much bravado, In Falcons and Teddy Bears (Fig 4), he sets up a confrontation that out to be lopsided as a falcon/handgun, military stripes on its wing, faces down a subordinate teddy bear from with a none-too-subtle iconic death head between them. Curiously, the encounter takes place on an easy chair, an object so friendly and accommodating that it almost entirely deflates the threat represented by the falcon. Look a little closer and you notice that the teddy bear looks entirely unconcerned. 

There is more than a little humor wafting through Hughes’ ruminations on power relationships. In Libido (Fig 5), power is conferred to the feminine as a predatory falcon is adorned in a yellow bikini. It’s a somewhat hobbled power, as the bikinied bird is dissected and one-legged, standing alert but looking somewhat dumb, perhaps a little more pigeon than falcon. Situated not atop a pedestal, but cloistered within a pedestal like form, its rarified presence is accentuated and shielded from the prodigious but feeble-looking ejaculate spurting form the male proxy of cannon/toothpaste tube.

In Other History (Fig 6), Hughes speaks absurdity to power with a touch of autobiography. A portrait of the artist’s face appears as a speck within the fallopian tubes rendered on the left of the canvas, while the bottom third of the work is dominated by a collaged melange of images of the artist’s father, from a portrait of journalists in Ghana. Dominating the center of the painting is an ardent anti-colonial imprint, a denial of barcode uniformity and the goat-headed military figure, vainly attempting to secure its dignity while perched in a urial. Even the predatory image in the work, a lion’s head, is represented merely by its lack, its skeletal remain. In a final affirmative gesture, we see a lightbulb hanging a dead falcon– to Hughes, a good idea can string up pernicious power. 

An earlier work, Fruition (Fig 7), collapses several of Hughes’ preoccupations into one work. There is the hybridized bird, a stuffed-shirted male looking a little preposterous, eyeballing a female form—head replaced by an apple, she is literally the apple of his eyes (of which there are several). Sketches of war vehicles hover around, suggestions of burgeoning male power, but they’re muted and it’s the more salacious images of alcohol and ice cream that attract the eye. Off to the side, an exploded view depiction of male genitalia reveals the one not-so-subtle truth: as with the rutting flies spritzed with Crown Royal, the internal combustion here is identified simply as “BREW.”

If one has doubts about the limits of power and violence, particularly the limits of masculine power, Mortality (Fig 8) makes the starkest case of any of Hughes’ recent paintings. The allusion could not be more obvious, a headless slab of carcass partially wrapped in bandages. Well, not exactly headless, as the head of a penis peeks out from the tip of the bloodied mass. The solid blast of color Hughes infuses the center of the work with energizes the inert form, making it appear even more violent and terrific, as though its violent impulses still pulsed through its deadness But there is no denying its rigor.

It’s muscular, masculine, meaty , and dead.