Left: A work in oil on canvas. (Right) One of Ablade Glover’s works in oil on canvas.

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

ARTIANA, the click and brick hybrid auction house based in Dubai, is currently offering an online selling exhibition titled Ode to the Women of Ghana of the works of Ghanaian artist and educator Ablade Glover. On till March 31, 15 masterworks of the artist’s enduring homage to the women of his native land are being showcased. Each canvas is replete with dynamic strokes that cascade into thick impastos of vibrant colours and textures, melding into a collection of works that straddle the line between abstraction and realism, underlining and exalting the quiet strength, courage and dignity of Ghanaian women, their roles and contribution to society and the world at large. “Glover’s subject matter,” says Wikipedia, “typically favours large urban landscapes, lorry parks, shantytowns, thronging markets and studies of the women of Ghana. Asked about his influences, he has said: “... if you notice, you see a lot of women in my work and people do ask me, why do you paint so many women? The first time I was asked the question, I didn’t think about it. I just opened my mouth and said because they are more beautiful than men. That wasn’t a serious answer. It was later, thinking about it, that it struck me they have courage. Women of Africa have some courage and they show it. When they walk the street, they are elegant. They are courageous, they are brave. When they are going about, they show it. Men don’t do that, do they?”

“Anybody who knows anything about traditional African art,” says New African Magazine, “is aware of Ghana’s splendid legacy of sculpture, Asante gold-work, Kente cloths, Adinkra prints and Asafo flags, to name but a few genres admired and collected around the world. By contrast, missionary teachers, who from the turn of the 20th century introduced Western aesthetic concepts, techniques and materials, influenced the first generation of modern Ghanaian artists.

“This resulted in a sometimes uneasy balancing act for this first artistic wave before and following Independence in 1957, a tension, even a struggle between adherence to indigenous African art forms and the pull of acquired Western influence, boosted by exposure to Western contemporary art. Glover is a principal representative of a second generational wave of Ghanaian artists, who, as Nigerian artist Uche Okeke put it, created a “natural synthesis” of traditional African sensibility and adaptation of modern Western styles and techniques.” In the Ode, Glover works with a palette knife, applying thick layers of oil paint with vivid gestural strokes, in an as-yet-unmeasured exactitude he honed through practice. “This style and his masterful use of colours,” says ARTIANA, “is evident in his distinct portrayals of Ghanaian women seen in this exhibition. It captures his genius as an artist and his sublime reverence for the iconography and what it represents.”

Ablade Glover is an African art icon.

It was Glover’s use of colour that led the UK’s October Gallery to exclaim that “accentuated by his choice of vibrant colours expressing the visual richness of the African continent, Glover’s paintings amass energy from his subjects.” Here, he uses electric colours to highlight the elegance, femininity and dignity of Ghanaian women. “Professor Glover’s art,” says curator Sakhi Gcina, shedding more light on the subject, “is not only a homage to women’s strength and resilience, but also a reclamation of power from the colonial exploitation of the nation’s wealth and human labour. Through Glover’s sculpted canvasses, women are canonised in the modern art history of Africa as figures worthy of dignified celebration. His paintings are a recognition of their revolt against the patriarchal, inhumane, and exploitative imperial monopoly of Ghana’s colonial past. The women who are the backbone of Ghana’s informal economy epicentre become heroic figures in Glover’s artworks; a representation of their self-empowerment and feminist action in prevailing against the everyday struggles of life in contemporary urban Africa.”

Glover was born in Accra and was trained in Ghana, the UK and the United States. The young Glover accepted in 1959, a scholarship to study textiles design at London’s prestigious Central School of Art and Design. After a short teaching period in Ghana following this, he travelled this time, to the United States, studying for a Master Degree at Kent State University before proceeding to Ohio State University, where he was awarded his Doctorate. Characteristically, he put these extensive overseas studies in textiles, design, painting and art education to use back in his native Ghana where the next two decades saw him teaching full time at the College of Art in the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), eventually rising to become both Department Head and College Dean. He established the Artists Alliance Gallery (AAG) in 1993; it won a reputation as the only major private gallery to exhibit the work of modern Ghana artists in the capital of Accra. It was also a place where young Ghanaian artists would work together to help and learn from each other. In 1998, Glover was awarded the Order of the Volta and Flagstar Award by the Art Critic and Reviews Association of Ghana — he also obtained the distinguished AFGRAD Alumni Award from Africa America Institute in New York. He is a life fellow of the Royal Society of Art, London and his paintings have universal appeal. They are represented in public and private collections as diverse as the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the Imperial Palace Collection of Japan and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.