James Mishio is a Ghanaian mixed-media painter who lives and works in Accra. His practice layers oil, acrylic, pastel and found objects with palette-knife impasto to create abstracted figurative works which foreground the humanity of his subjects. His works have shown in gallery contexts including Coningsby Gallery (London) and Pearl Lam Galleries (Hong Kong), and he has featured in a collaborative exhibition “Bird of a Feather” presented by Phillips Auction House and Artemartis—positioning him among a rising cohort in Ghana’s contemporary scene.

Exemplified by the present lot, Red Cap Sculptor, Mishio’s impasto technique when applied to the depiction of his figures gives a sculptural quality to the skin of his sitters. The artist employs this device to highlight the history of oppression and resilience associated with blackness. In this work, Mishio’s sitter is depicted sculpting a traditional stool, an indelible constituent of Ghanaian visual culture and artistic heritage. Believed to be imbued with the soul of its sitter, the stool and its sculptor might be construed as representing the importance of traditional cultural practice to contemporary postcolonial life. The work is thus an act of synthesis in itself, utilising the pictorial devices of global contemporary art to recentre the precolonial artistic tradition.