EP118 - AUGUSTINE KOFIE

To hear the full version with music, visit Vantagepointradio.comThe work of Los Angeles based painter Augustine Kofie is visual jazz… an improvised expression of a moment in time, and possibly the artist himself, laid down with a technical precision and delicate subtlety only he is capable of. His paintings are an amalgamation of experiences and influences absorbed over decades of being acutely tuned in to his environment. With no formal training, Kofie found his entrance into the arts through graffiti as a teenager, eventually feeling the limitations of the letter forms he began to expand and abstract his work. Before long the letters were nearly unrecognizable if not gone all together, replaced by undefined fields of colour washes and geometric structure. In the early 2000’s it became clear that artists all over the globe were having similar thoughts… to take this one common influence of graffiti and twist it and blow it out into something completely different. By 2010 Kofie and a handful of other artists were at the helm of a driving movement known as Graffuturism inspiring a new generation of artists to approach art making in a whole new light. With an impressive catalogue of international exhibitions and an ever expanding collector base Kofie continues to push his work and keep it fresh experimenting with materials and textures in his own ‘retro-futuristic’ way.