Gallery 1957

In Yussif Musah’s studio ✨ Born in Kumasi, Ghana, Yussif Musah’s practice spans drawing, photography, painting, and large-scale murals. His work is grounded in questions of restoration, personal memory, archive-making, decay, and colonial legacies, creating immersive visual narratives that challenge dominant frameworks of memory and knowledge. In his ongoing painting practice, Musah restores the archive through mark, texture, and atmosphere. Drawing from both photographic archives and lived experience, he renders landscapes as carriers of memory, mood, and communal rhythms. His mural work transforms fragments of history and experience into immersive narratives that are at once intimate and monumental. For his upcoming show later this year with Gallery 1957, Musah will present the first public exhibition of his paintings alongside his continuing exploration of large-scale murals. — #Gallery1957 #1957residency @musahyussif1

Boudicca meets Yaa Asantewaa ✊ ㅤ 10 DAYS TO GO | Godfried Donkor: It’s a Numbers Game - open from Sat 23 May ㅤ Join us for the Opening Celebration on Fri 22 May and be among the first to experience Godfried Donkor’s first big UK solo show in a major gallery. ㅤ Go on an immersive journey through the shared histories of Britain, West Africa, and the Caribbean - revealing how Colchester’s past is deeply intertwined with Ghana’s. ㅤ Enjoy soft drinks, beers, wines, and the signature Donkor Special at the Berryfield Café. Soundtrack for the night curated by Godfried Donkor. ㅤ 📅Fri 22 May, 6–10pm 📍Firstsite, Colchester 🎟 Free entry — @firstsitecolchester @godfrieddonkor ㅤ 📸 Godfried Donkor, It's a Numbers Game V, 2019. Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery 1957.

Gallery 1957 presents “Geometry of Elsewhere” — Freya Tewelde’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, opening 5 June in London as part of London Gallery Weekend. A new body of abstract paintings unfolds through layered textures, rhythmic gestures, and intuitive colour — tracing movement, memory, and the spaces in between. Moving away from figuration, Tewelde creates works that feel both personal and expansive. Born in Asmara and raised in Saudi Arabia, the artist draws on diasporic memory and ancestral heritage, building surfaces that hold emotion, repetition, and transformation. Join us for the opening reception on Friday, 5 June, 6–9pm at Gallery 1957, London. On view through 28 July 2026. — @freyatew @londongalleryweekend

Throwback to A Family Affair, Cornelius Annor’s 2021 solo exhibition at Gallery 1957, where portraiture, textiles and archival fragments converged in richly layered compositions suspended between memory and material. Tender yet expansive, the exhibition unfolded through works that explored childhood, lineage and belonging, inviting viewers into intimate worlds shaped by remembrance and inheritance. Engaging family archives, oral histories and personal ephemera, Annor repositioned the domestic as a site of cultural preservation, transforming inherited objects into contemporary forms that carry both personal and collective memory. Across the exhibition, vintage photographs, transferred fabrics and painterly gestures collapse distinctions between past and present, creating a fluid visual language that resists fixed time and place. - @iam_c_annor #throwback #africancontemporaryart #gallery1957

This week, as La Biennale di Venezia opens its doors, Godfried Donkor unveils a new commissioned large scale painting titled Michael and the Dragon II and featured in Koyo Kouoh’s group exhibition in the Giardini. The composition draws on mythological iconography as a vessel for layered histories. The work invokes the enduring narrative of good triumphing over evil, while a recurring motif—the slave ship—anchors the composition in Donkor’s ongoing engagement with the legacies of transatlantic slavery. Bringing together references that span geographies and epochs, from the Chinese dragon to maritime trade imagery, the painting resists singular narratives, instead tracing the complex circulation of culture, power, and belief. 📍 Giardini, Venice 📅 May 9 – November 22, 2026 — @labiennale @godfrieddonkor #BiennaleArte2026 #InMinorKeys

Step inside Gabriel Selassie’s studio—where new work comes alive through gesture, sound, and movement. Created during his residency in Accra and leading up to a solo show curated by Marina Paulenka, this evolving body of work explores belonging and vulnerability. For Selassie, painting is raw, intuitive, and deeply felt. Working across painting, sound, and movement, his practice unfolds through listening to memory, the body, and what resists language. His canvases are layered, built and undone, carrying traces of emotion rather than fixed narratives. At its heart, the work is a tribute to the women who shaped him: his mother, grandmothers, aunts, and a circle of care and resilience. They linger not as portraits, but as atmospheres where memory and sensation merge, and the personal becomes shared. __ #Gallery1957 #1957residency @selassiethefuerst @marinapaulenka

A new chapter is unfolding… ✨ We’re excited to be working closely with Freya Tewelde on a new body of work for her upcoming inaugural solo show with the Gallery that will open during London Gallery Weekend. In this work titled ‘The Remembering Waters’ fluid layers of turquoise and sea-green unfold across the surface, punctuated by luminous bursts of pink, yellow, and violet. The composition feels both eruptive and dissolving, as if forms are emerging and slipping away at once. Through its drips, gestures, and shifting densities, the painting evokes a state of transformation—where energy, memory, and matter remain in constant flux. Born in Asmara and raised in Saudi Arabia, her work draws on diasporic experience and ancestral memory—exploring ritual, transformation, and spaces that hold uncertainty while resisting fixed meaning. More to come soon. Stay close. 👁️ — @freyatew @londongalleryweekend

We are proud and grateful to announce the partnership between Gallery 1957 and the Omenaa Foundation, following the Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize receiving a grant through The Philanthropic Consortium. This generous support will allow the Yaa Asantewaa Art Prize to grow exponentially, creating even greater opportunities for Ghanaian women artists and expanding their reach internationally. Gallery 1957 is honoured to continue championing emerging female artists, supporting their growth and potential, and sharing their work with wider audiences around the world. #Gallery1957 #OmenaaArtFoundation #YaaAsantewaaArtPrize #PhilanthropicConsortium #WomenArtists GhanaianArtists —- @yaaasantewaaartprize @philanthropic.consortium @omenaartfoundation @omenaamensah

ONE MONTH TO GO | 🥊 Godfried Donkor: It’s a Numbers Game ㅤ Step into a boxing ring. Stand face-to-face with the leaders and resisters who shaped history. Walk through waves of figures rising from the pages of the Financial Times. ㅤ 📸 Image Credits: Godfried Donkor, St Ike Quartey, 2023, Oil, Acrylic and Gold Leaf on Canvas, 200 x 160 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Tia Collection. ㅤ 📅Exhibition opening celebration | Fri 22 May from 6pm, Firstsite, Colchester (free entry). More info soon! ㅤ 📍 Firstsite, Colchester — @firstsitecolchester @godfrieddonkor

Gallery 1957 is proud to announce that a work by Rita Mawuena Benissan has been selected for the group exhibition ‘Kabarin-javakanto, une lecture de la Collection Fondation H’ curated by Abdellah Karroum. Her work, Assembly of the People, depicts the King of Akropong and his chiefs gathered with their community beneath large traditional umbrellas. Originally photographed in black and white in the 1880s, the image is reimagined through intricate embroidered thread, restoring not only colour but also a renewed sense of dignity, visibility, and presence. In Benissan’s hands, Assembly of the People becomes more than a reworking of an archival photograph; it becomes an act of return. 📅 April 23 - October 17, 2026 📍 Fondation H, Madagasca — @fondationh_ @ritamawuena

With the opening of Venice Biennale fast approaching, we are so excited to celebrate the inclusion of Godfried Donkor in Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys group presentation in the Giardini. In Donkor’s composition, the page becomes a minor key, an intimate register where history hums rather than declares itself and where artistic practice bleeds seamlessly into life and society. In this work title FT Man, Godfried Donkor sets the pages of the Financial Times alight with colour and fervour, drawing from the rich ambits of Ashanti cultural life, where collage becomes both archive and living procession. Working with images drawn from his own archive, Donkor layers lived experience with histories of pride and collective triumph. Figures move through the visual field in resonance with the Ashanti Yam Festival, adorned in ornament, carrying both joy and ceremony as a shared language. Umbrellas recur as powerful cultural signifiers rooted in Ashanti ceremonial tradition where they denote authority, protection and presence. La Biennale di Venezia 📅 May 9 – November 22, 2026 📍 Venice, Italy @labiennale @godfrieddonkor #BiennaleArte2026 #InMinorKeys

Gallery 1957 is delighted to announce that Boys in Blue (2023) by Arthur Timothy has been selected for inclusion in the Sunday Best exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Spotlighting the power of Black style, Sunday Best traces the histories of migration, activism, self-determination, and fashion design, woven into the enduring ritual of dressing in one’s “best” clothing. Told through displays of fashion, visual art, ephemera, and time-based media, this expansive exhibition considers the use of style and self-fashioning in Black diasporic communities, from the 1880s to the present. Other artists include: Sasha Huber, Laura Wheeler Waring, Barkley L.Hendricks and Amy Sherald. Photographers include: James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, Ajamu X and Diane Arbus. Fashion designers include: Christopher John Rogers, Labrum, Stephen Burrows, Patrick Kelly and Bianca Saunders. Sunday Best runs at the Art Gallery of Ontario from 10th October 2026 until 28th February 2027, before travelling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 17th April 2027 until 8th August 2027. — @arthurbtimothy @agotoronto @visitpham