Augustine Kofie

Born and based in Los Angeles, artist Augustine Kofie began his career in the California graffiti scene in the 1990’s. Kofie now works in paint, collage and mural formats. Kofie’s work brings together disparate elements including graffiti’s chaotic lettering, technical drafting, typography, modern architecture, and Bauhaus, with an overarching focus on clear, distinguished lines and forms, such as perfect, round circles and Pythagoreaen triangles, combined with a distinct longing for the natural world and its forms, resulting in a unique form of abstraction.

Growing up in L.A., its influence on Kofie’s work is evident. Wide, angular shadows, shapes reminiscent of freeways and looming grey concrete structures are backlit by an omnipresent West Coast haze, the polluted skies contributing to Kofie’s post-apocalyptic vision of the urban future. Kofie’s inclusion of natural forms is consistent in his work – in In Search of California, portions of blue sky and fluffy white clouds, clearly rendered, peek out from behind the collision of shapes and words, giving a glimmer of hope and duality to the work. Kofie’s earthy colours and layers of angular, otherworldly shapes are rendered with the preciseness of computerised drafting, although his work is done on canvas with acrylic polymer. Kofie’s work seamlessly blends the organic, soft and vibrant past with the sandy, washed-out and hazy dystopian future of his childhood home. Kofie’s love for the core is of the city is evident. Those straight and ordered forms we might see individually as tower blocks or skyscrapers, are applied to the canvas in a collagist fashion, rendering their orderly nature chaotic through their placement and angle.

Kofie also works via mural interventions, taking graffiti art to its limits in terms of size, context, and scope. Clients include the University Grenoble Alpse, Spotify, and many others. Kofie has exhibited solo in the U.S., Japan, the U.K., Paris, Morocco, and Spain, and in group exhibitions in South Africa, Italy, France, the U.S Denmark, Australia, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland.

In this commission Kofie draws upon the angular forms and umber tones of the Abereiddy cliffs, the deserted industrial workings and the overarching clarity of the Atlantic skies. The paintings are imbued with the sense of exposure and the lost past of this remote and beautiful place.