Kwame Akoto. Almighty God Art Works

Born in 1950, Kwame Akoto has developed since the 1970s a practice at the crossroads of commercial commission and preaching. Trained as a sign painter and based in Kumasi, he signed decorations for vehicles and facades while developing a personal work that is immediately readable and deeply engaged.

The musée du quai Branly offers a dense and coherent overview of this trajectory: painted slogans, moralizing aphorisms, portraits, and scenes of Ghanaian daily life compose paintings that aim as much to instruct as to question. The presentation highlights the proximity between artisanal gesture and religious message.

The museum also holds a work by Akoto acquired in 2017, anchoring the artist’s arrival in the collection and allowing the Parisian public to measure the international resonance of a practice long confined to the roads and crossroads of Ghana.

Located at a strategic crossroads, Akoto’s workshop responds to orders from drivers and transporters who stop in the neighborhood. On the exterior walls, displayed paintings act as a moving showcase: eye-catching lettering, narrative compositions, and instantly readable images attract passersby’s attention and sum up a popular visual economy.

The quai Branly exhibition recreates this workshop-shop atmosphere—tight groupings, echoes of the street, constant reference to commissions—to show how a commercial space can become a place of creation where art also serves preaching and community life.

In 1991, Kwame Akoto experienced a conversion marking a decisive turning point in his work. An active member of his faith community, he integrates biblical passages, moral reprimands, and consoling phrases into his paintings.

The Born Again series, produced in the mid-1990s, explicitly revisits this personal and artistic shift. Faith does not overshadow the social dimension of his work; on the contrary, it merges with it.

The paintings multiply civic warnings and moral exhortations while maintaining irony and humor that make the message accessible and humane.

The self-portrait often returns as a device: sometimes Akoto depicts himself, sometimes he assumes a role or symbolic figure. These presences are ways to question the artist’s identity, his function as a moral guide, and the scope of his message.

The motifs of incised or painted eyes serve as constant reminders of the gaze, vigilance, and individual and collective responsibility. Sometimes hybridized, sometimes stylized, these faces and eyes give the paintings visual intensity that supports the painted text and strengthens the performative dimension of these image-sermons.