Joseph Awuah-Darko: How Is Your Day Going?

About

Ed Cross is delighted to present How is your day going?, the gallery’s first show with Joseph Awuah-Darko, and his first solo exhibition in London. 

Following his 2024 residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, US, the artist has embarked on a new iteration of his ongoing Days series. Demarcated by an evolving palette, the latest works place increasingly biomorphic forms against bands of colour, reminiscent of both Ghanaian Kente cloth and the paintings of Sean Scully: pale blue joins luminous orange; deep mauve, claret-clear red.

While they have developed visually since their earliest incarnations, Awuah-Darko’s new Days paintings are drawn from the same well – namely, meticulous Excel spreadsheets produced to track his moods. Initially emerging as a therapeutic means of dealing with ongoing bouts of depression, the artist’s process translates blocks of digital colour into oil on canvas. Between the abstraction of the finished pieces and the precision of their source material, a counterintuitive logic emerges: “one thing I took from my time at Albers was this idea that the process is the art, more than the destination,” says the artist.

Awuah-Darko’s time at Albers’ was “transformative, both personally and professionally”, he notes; as such, it is fitting that it forms the basis for his first major London presentation. As well as impacting the work itself, the residency coincided with the artist’s coming out to his family, besides other pressures; across How is your day going?, those emotional upheavals are (literally) writ large.

With gallery walls painted in colours from the works hung on them, the show echoes the intensity of its artist’s experience in its presentation. Drawn into immersive, intimate conversation with the work, Awuah-Darko’s viewer is both plunged into his inner life and – per the exhibition title – asked how her own might look. Presenting hyper-personal material via a generously accessible medium, externalising that which is profoundly internal, How is your day going? exemplifies that old magic trick, whereby what is most specific crosses into what is most universal.