Ayi Mensah (b.1986) is Ghanaian based painter whose work explores and examines the sublime dissonance and paradoxes which life conjures.

The source of Ayi’s painting are found images of anonymous people.

He reimagines and translate the images into ambiguous state between figuration and abstraction, hence shifting them from their actual context and time, into a new pictorial form and space.

Usually he portrays figures in seemingly unimaginable, enigmatic or devised way.

His works unveil and magnify the contradiction or tension of parallel life of the masses,

that once could make life dystopian or elysian.

Parodying Hobbes and Rousseau visual vocabulary and visual shorthand for crisis, memory and time.

Also a totem for reanimating dead duck, impel social mobility and reflection of fated hands of time’s change.

ARTIST STATEMENT

”I am interested in transformation which is expressed in figuration and abstraction, I dare to encourage my audience to shift your static notion and normative narrative, hoping that it collapses your worldview and engender an adaptation of new thinking [lens]. Begin then my friend by unveiling the beauty held in this enigma.’