Kpe Innocent

Long Story Short Los Angeles is pleased to present Blessings by Kpe Innocent.

Self-taught Ghanaian artist, Kpe Innocent, strives to produce universally resonant work with themes of love, grace, and hope. Educated in journalism, Innocent independently studied various movements and figures in the art world, from the Bauhaus movement and minimalist aesthetic to artists such as Hockney and Hopper. These interests manifest in Innocent’s paintings along with his focus on form and architecture to create his signature style: the distinctive harmonization of geometric shapes and muted and tonal colors with an inventive approach to composition and negative space.

Blessings is a meditation on the ubiquity of the human experience—a theme constant throughout Innocents’s work. These series of paintings provide Innocent the platform to discuss what it means for him to be blessed (in a season of lack) and what it means to be favoured by God, through Jesus Christ. Through this lens, there is also an invitation for the viewer to take a look at the relationship between creation and its creator, a primary commonality we share as humans, regardless of our sociological and geographical differences.

Isolated figures in these works evoke a sense of belonging by depicting our shared state of individuality; geometric shapes and distinct boundaries juxtapose the series’ transcendence of borders; and the paintings’ human subjects remain featureless and abstract, portraying no one in particular, while simultaneously representing us all.