2023
ghanaian pesewa, steel, copperwire, wood
153 x 168 x 9,5 cm
Estimate: €30,000 – 35,000
Record: €76,200
Sold at the TOP CHARITY Auction for €55,000
Yaw Owusu creates sculptural paintings and installations, transforming seemingly insignificant materials into works rich with metaphorical meaning. His work, We Face Forward, is part of the series Everything You Touch Is Gold, created during a residency in Ghana with Gallery 1957 in 2023. It centres on themes of reclamation and reinterpretation of traditional art forms, symbols, and history in our present-day realities.
The work was inspired by the idea that liberation is a continuous process. The title, taken from a statement by Dr Kwame Nkrumah, encourages strategies for overcoming setbacks and looking towards possibilities presenting themselves in a variety of forms. We Face Forward incorporates hundreds of pesewa coins — the smallest denomination of Ghanaian currency — a material frequently used by the artist. It was created through experimental alchemical processes that produce colour and texture without using paint or ink. These techniques, applied to stainless steel, copper, and coins, engage with the very process by which currency is made — a crucial element in the artist’s exploration of how value is constructed.
Yaw Owusu (b. 1993) is a Ghanaian artist who lives and works in New York. A central theme of his work is Africa’s economic independence. Frequently, Owusu incorporates pesewa coins from Ghana, a symbol of the country’s ongoing struggle with inflation since 2007, and juxtaposes them with the American cent, associated with Abraham Lincoln and emancipation, raising questions about the meaning of freedom in the modern world. Owusu’s works are held in numerous prestigious public collections, including Foundation H, the Presidential Residence of Ghana, the World Bank, Al Maaden Museum of Contemporary African Art in Marrakech, and Meta’s headquarters in New York.
