During the preview week of the 61st Venice Biennale, when Venice once again became the center of the global art world, one of the city’s most quietly arresting exhibitions unfolded within the historic interiors of Museo di Palazzo Grimani. There, Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo opened It Doesn’t Have to Always Make Sense, his first solo exhibition in Italy, presented in collaboration with Gagosian. Rather than competing with the spectacle and velocity that often define Biennale week, Boafo’s exhibition moves with a different rhythm—intimate, spatial, emotionally charged, and deeply attentive to the politics of presence.
Installed across the second floor of the 16th-century Renaissance palace, the exhibition stages a remarkable encounter between contemporary Black portraiture and the weight of Venetian art history. Boafo’s textured figures, rendered through his now-signature finger painting technique, occupy the palazzo with striking confidence and vulnerability, entering into dialogue with centuries of portraiture, architecture, ornamentation, and cultural memory embedded within the building itself. Palazzo Grimani does not function merely as a backdrop for the works; it becomes an active collaborator in the exhibition, shaping how the paintings are experienced and understood. Lace motifs reference Venetian traditions, while carefully considered spatial interventions allow the paintings to converse directly with the museum’s surfaces, histories, and silences.
Over the past decade, Boafo has emerged as one of the defining painters of his generation, celebrated internationally for portraits that foreground Black identity, style, intimacy, and self-possession. Yet It Doesn’t Have to Always Make Sense reveals an artist increasingly interested not only in portraiture itself, but in the environments surrounding it. Collaborating with architect Glenn DeRoche, Boafo has continued to expand beyond the conventional white cube, creating immersive exhibition landscapes that allow viewers to move through his world rather than simply observe it. In Venice, that approach takes on heightened resonance. The paintings do not ask permission to belong within the canon of European portraiture; they assert their place within it, bridging historical absences while opening new possibilities for how Black presence can inhabit historically charged spaces.
During the opening week of the exhibition in Venice, Africans Column spoke with Amoako Boafo about presenting his first solo exhibition in Italy, responding to the architecture and atmosphere of Palazzo Grimani, intuition and play within his practice, and the evolving relationship between portraiture, community, and cultural history. What emerged was a conversation grounded not in spectacle, but in clarity, sensitivity, and a deep awareness of the spaces his work now occupies.
Africans Column: Your exhibition at Museo di Palazzo Grimani marks your first solo exhibition in Italy. What felt most important to establish in this body of work, especially within a city like Venice where art history is so present?
Amoako Boafo: By putting Black portraiture in conversation with Venetian masterpieces, I’m trying to bridge the gap between that classical legacy and the contemporary Black experience. My sitters have a physical presence—a materiality—that comes from their poses and the way they look back at you. They belong in this history just as much as anyone else.
Africans Column: Many of the works in the exhibition are described as responding directly to the architecture and historical atmosphere of Palazzo Grimani. How did the space shape your thinking while developing the show?
Amoako Boafo: I worked with the many elements of the space and also undertook its challenges to bring a piece of home to the museum. There are many paintings that respond to the history and traditions of Venice, such as those focusing on lace, and those which I included based on what made sense for the unique architecture. I see it as a conversation and building bridges between the paintings, the walls, the ancient history of the location, and the contemporary culture of my life.
Africans Column: This exhibition opens just ahead of the 61st Venice Biennale, when the eyes of the art world are on the city. Did that timing influence how you approached the presentation, or did you try to keep your focus entirely on the work itself?
Amoako Boafo: I can’t say the timing of the exhibition, coinciding with the Biennale, didn’t cross my mind—one of the paintings I included is of the late curator Koyo Kouoh. But beyond that, the focus was entirely on the works themselves and in considering the space in the museum.
Africans Column: Your practice has continually expanded the language of portraiture, particularly through the way you use your fingers to build the surfaces of your subjects. What does that physical closeness to the canvas still allow you to express that other methods do not?
Amoako Boafo: There is an intimacy in applying paint directly to the canvas with my fingers and it gives the subjects a sense of presence the viewer can hopefully feel. It’s also about the texture and the blending of colors. That closeness merges the subject in the portrait with the environment around them.
Africans Column: Portraiture has such a deep history in Venice and in European painting more broadly. What interests you about placing contemporary Black subjects into dialogue with that lineage in a setting like Palazzo Grimani?
Amoako Boafo: There’s a history that is so palpable in the Palazzo—my exhibition is on the second floor, and the first floor holds the museum’s collection of portraits of the Grimani family, for example. I am interested in building these bridges from past to present, and it’s also an exploration into identity more broadly, to show something more vulnerable and creative.
Africans Column: The title It Doesn’t Have to Always Make Sense suggests an openness to ambiguity and intuition. What drew you to that title, and how does it reflect the way you want viewers to meet these works?
Amoako Boafo: There’s a sense of personality and playfulness to my subjects. My path to the art world wasn’t linear and I believe what I create is based on intuition, which is what I want to express with this title.
Africans Column: Your recent institutional projects have involved creating environments around the paintings, including site responsive presentations such as your exhibition in Gyeongju. What interests you about building a spatial experience around the work rather than simply hanging paintings on a wall?
Amoako Boafo: I have been collaborating with architect Glenn DeRoche on my recent projects to create environments for my exhibitions and it’s been a great partnership. It allows viewers to enter my world in a completely immersive
With It Doesn’t Have to Always Make Sense, Amoako Boafo presents more than a solo exhibition in Venice. He stages a conversation across time, geography, and representation—one that moves between Ghana and Venice, between Renaissance portraiture and contemporary Black identity, between institutional history and lived experience.
Inside Palazzo Grimani, Boafo’s subjects occupy space with quiet confidence and undeniable presence. They do not ask permission to enter the canon; they reshape its boundaries simply by being seen within it. Through gesture, texture, architecture, and intuition, the exhibition proposes a different way of thinking about portraiture—not as a fixed historical form, but as a living, evolving language capable of holding vulnerability, memory, beauty, and belonging all at once.
At a moment when global conversations around African contemporary art continue to expand, Boafo’s Venice exhibition stands as both a personal milestone and a broader cultural statement. It affirms not only the importance of representation, but the importance of presence: the ability to exist fully within spaces that once excluded you, and in doing so, transform them forever.
Written By Caleb Oheneba-Takyi for Africans Column
