Berlin | ArtRegion: Charlottenburg

Gnyp Gallery

Raphael Adjetey Adjei Mayne: Assuming you look like me

10. Juli – 22. August 2021

A particular strength of Raphael Adjetey Adjei Mayne’s artistic practice is that he works with lively surfaces. The people he portrays float in front of dynamic flower fields, hover above the vibrating monochrome color panels, or place themselves in modest background made out of jeans or awning fabric. Despite these diverse facets, a dense, inner coherence pervades his works and makes them easy recognizable.

Communication and encounter are the starting point, drive and goal of each of Mayne’s works. This is especially true of the children he portrays. During his stays in Ghana, he attentively talks to them, inquiring about their interests and encouraging them to follow his example to pursue their own individual path. He then captures the shared moment in a photograph in order to process it later in his Cologne studio. There, Mayne creates multi-layered dialogues between individual picture elements through painting and sewing, as well as through combinations of fabrics of different qualities and opaque acrylic paints, which he then combines to form a colorful portrait of different materials and haptics. On the surface, the West African Adinkra fabrics full of eponymous and meaningful symbols appear in exchange with pop culture motifs, logos and brands as well as industrial textiles such as polyester. In a certain way, this dense assemblage on the painting’s exterior repeats the elaborate production process of the Adinkra fabrics, which are traditionally woven, sewn, and printed by hand. Mayne’s skillful approach and his broad technical repertoire lead to optical illusions, in which painted and applied layers can hardly be distinguished. All this diversity ultimately results in the overlap of traditional and contemporary, Ghanaian and Western European signs and influences, and through the mediation of image motifs contributes to a substantial merging of times and places.