Maxwell Boadi’s new works feel like a homecoming.
After a period marked by restraint, quiet surfaces, flattened spaces, and deliberate stillness, Boadi returns to the canvas with renewed energy and conviction. Colour surges back into his practice. Movement re-emerges. Layers build upon layers, reasserting the physical pleasure of paint and the emotional force of gesture.
These recent works are bold, textured, and alive. Rich impasto and unbridled colour dominate the surface, restoring a sense of immediacy and vitality. Boadi once again tells his stories through vibrancy and motion, embracing the joy of painting and the freedom of expressive mark-making that defined much of his earlier work.
In ‘Olive’, ‘Identity’, and ‘Mother and Child’, this renewed visual language brings urgency and directness to the images. ‘Olive’ and ‘Identity’ explore personal perception, self-definition, and cultural liberation. Their multilayered colours and energetic surfaces speak to presence, resilience, and the quiet strength of African womanhood.
‘Mother and Child’ shifts the focus to intimacy and connection. What begins as an observation of a street trader with her child unfolds into a heartfelt tribute to motherhood, its endurance, tenderness, and unbreakable bond, rendered through luminous colour and rhythmic movement.
With these works, Boadi reaffirms his command of colour and motion. The paintings feel confident and unencumbered, signalling not a departure, but a return: to passion, to storytelling, and to the expressive possibilities that lie at the heart of his practice.