Portrait of an Artist - Legendary Ghanaian Ablade Glover at 90

Legendary Ghanaian artist, Ablade Glover, talks exclusively to Africa Here and Now on the occasion of his 90th birthday and the opening of his 10th exhibition at London’s October Gallery, Inner Worlds, Outer Journeys. He takes us through seven decades of loading his palette knife with oils to create dense, mainly urban scenes. He explains his love of Accra life, the hustle and bustle. His work has been described as extracting order from disorder. “I seem to study the aesthetic of the chaotic phenomenon” he’s reported to have once said. Ablade recalls that it was independent Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah, who helped him get his first scholarship to study in the UK. Not only famed for his vibrant paintings, Ablade Glover is renowned for encouraging and inspiring younger artists. His gallery, the Artists Alliance, on Accra’s seafront, is one of the great spaces in which their work is featured. #africanart #artist #interview