Gabriel Selassie Tsagli - Son of Kafui: Gallery II, Accra
Past exhibition
Overview
Gallery 1957 is proud to present Son of Kafui, the first exhibition of Gabriel Selassie Tsagli in Accra, a Ghanaian artist living and working between Accra and Berlin, opening on 23 July, curated by Marina Paulenka.
The exhibition marks Selassie’s first with Gallery 1957, following his residency. Son of Kafui is a deeply personal return—shaped by memory and carried forward through devotion. The exhibition begins in the body’s remembrance of place: a specific mother, a specific city, a specific quality of light that never fully leaves. The title holds this intimacy. Kafui, meaning love or son of God’s own, was the name of Selassie’s late mother, anchoring the exhibition within a lived lineage of loss, care, and inheritance.
Born in Accra and raised between Ghana and Germany, Selassie's practice is shaped by displacement, return, and belonging across multiple geographies. Created following his return to Accra in 2025, these paintings navigate memory, lineage, and the experience of moving between the roles of son and father, offering a deeply personal reflection on home, remembrance, and transformation.
At the core of Selassie’s practice is an approach to painting that emerges from lived experience rather than pre-imagined form. Working with diverse tools and material registers, he builds surfaces through accumulation—layering, pressing, and scraping paint until it assumes a physical presence. Paint applied directly from the tube introduces a heightened material immediacy, foregrounding the body of the work itself. Within this process, colour becomes generative rather than descriptive: figures emerge through accumulation, as though remembered rather than constructed, while gesture moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction. Orange suggests action and movement, while blue becomes a space of articulation and reflection. Held in tension, these chromatic forces generate an emotional architecture that resists closure, sustaining openness and ambiguity throughout the works.
Across the exhibition, figures appear as both presence and trace. Some are portraits of known and intimate subjects; others emerge as fragments of memory, sensation, or unconscious image-making. The figure of the mother recurs throughout, suspended between presence and absence, rendered not as likeness but as atmosphere, colour, and material trace. Around these central motifs, smaller forms accumulate and disperse, evoking the city as a living, shifting organism.
Son of Kafui ultimately considers return not as resolution, but as ongoing negotiation. Installed in Accra, the exhibition is shaped by its relationship to the city that formed the artist, and by the responsibility of addressing that place directly. What the works propose is not interpretation, but presence—an invitation to remain with what resists closure, and to encounter meaning as it unfolds.
Download the press release & curatorial text below for more information.
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