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Viewing Amoako Boafo at Gagosian London

The Wick Culture - Amoako Boafo, Amidst Tulips, 2025. © Amoako Boafo, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, Courtesy Gagosian

Above Amoako Boafo, Amidst Tulips, 2025. © Amoako Boafo, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, Courtesy Gagosian

The Wick Culture - Amoako Boafo, Black Cycle, 2025. © Amoako Boafo, Photo: Joe Humphrys, Courtesy Gagosian

Above Amoako Boafo, Black Cycle, 2025. © Amoako Boafo, Photo: Joe Humphrys, Courtesy Gagosian

The Wick Culture - Amoako Boafo, Shoulder Stand, 2023. Amoako Boafo, Black Cycle, 2025. © Amoako Boafo, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, Courtesy Gagosian

Above Amoako Boafo, Shoulder Stand, 2023. Amoako Boafo, Black Cycle, 2025. © Amoako Boafo, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, Courtesy Gagosian

Above Amoako Boafo, Amidst Tulips, 2025. © Amoako Boafo, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, Courtesy Gagosian

Above Amoako Boafo, Black Cycle, 2025. © Amoako Boafo, Photo: Joe Humphrys, Courtesy Gagosian

Above Amoako Boafo, Shoulder Stand, 2023. Amoako Boafo, Black Cycle, 2025. © Amoako Boafo, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, Courtesy Gagosian

Amoako Boafo: I Do Not Come to You by Chance

Gagosian
April 10–May 24, 2025

Amoako Boafo needs no introduction: the 40 year-old Ghanaian portraitist is celebrated around the world for his luminous, bold and original figurative paintings. He’s partnered in the past with Dior (a collaborative collection was released in 2021), and has painted on Jeff Bezos’s rocket ship. His works today regularly achieve seven figures at auction.

Boafo joined Gagosian in 2022, and this exhibition – his first UK solo show – is on view at the gallery’s Grosvenor Hill location. It is also his first solo exhibition in the UK. It’s title, I Do Not Come to You By Chance, is after Nigerian novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s 2009 novel – a humorous and poignant story of the conflicts and contradictions of contemporary life. The title places Boafo’s portraits too in the realm of rich contemporary African storytelling, able to make the personal feel epic and the universal feel intimate.

He has taken over the large galleries with paintings, but also an installation recreating the courtyard of his childhood home in Ghana, made with architect Glenn DeRoche. The exhibition includes a large number of new and recent self-portraits, including with the artist’s young son, and paintings of friends and family – their tactility and texture comes in part from Boafo’s innovative technique of painting with his fingers. “I make paintings that allow me to celebrate where I come from and what I aspire to be, while sharing unique perspectives and understanding”, the artist says.

Viewing Rose Wylie at David Zwirner

The Wick Culture - Rose Wylie, Henry Triangle, 1996. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

Above Rose Wylie, Henry Triangle, 1996. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

The Wick Culture - Rose Wylie, Nebuchadnezzar's Dream, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

Above Rose Wylie, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

The Wick Culture - Rose Wylie, Lilith and Gucci Boy, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

Above Rose Wylie, Lilith and Gucci Boy, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

Above Rose Wylie, Henry Triangle, 1996. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

Above Rose Wylie, Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

Above Rose Wylie, Lilith and Gucci Boy, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner

Rose Wylie: When Found becomes Given

David Zwirner
April 3—May 23, 2025

The inimitable British painter Rose Wylie returns to London this week with her latest body of works, going on show at David Zwirner. Jennifer Higgie describes Wylie’s world as “not neat” but embodying something “very human”, and it is this chaotic, exuberant, vitality that makes Wylie so unique as an artist.

In this exhibition, titled ‘When Found becomes Given’, new and recent canvases and multipanel works blur the realms of the personal, symbolic, and historical—inhabiting real and imagined timelines, confusing our sense of any linear chronology (much like life itself). Colourful and witty, these paintings reveal Wylie’s recent formal interest in composition. Depicting apparently disparate things and often referencing history, contemporary culture and dreams, these paintings appear to hum and whir with their own wonderful rhythms.

This show is a taster of what is to come at the Royal Academy of Arts next year, when Wylie will have a major solo exhibition across the main galleries.

Viewing Secrets of the Thames at the London Museum

The Wick Culture - Lead badges (1300–1500) go on display at London Museum Docklands’ Secrets of the Thames exhibition. Image courtesy of London Museum

Above Lead badges (1300–1500) go on display at London Museum Docklands’ Secrets of the Thames exhibition. Image courtesy of London Museum

The Wick Culture - The neck from a stoneware bottle with a bearded face known as a Bartmann bottle 1500s – 1600s. The bearded face decorating the neck lies half-buried on the foreshore. Image courtesy of Alessio Checconi and London Museum

Above The neck from a stoneware bottle with a bearded face known as a Bartmann bottle 1500s – 1600s. The bearded face decorating the neck lies half-buried on the foreshore. Image courtesy of Alessio Checconi and London Museum

The Wick Culture - Mudlark Monika Buttling-Smith searches the foreshore. Image courtesy of London Museum

Above Mudlark Monika Buttling-Smith searches the foreshore. Image courtesy of London Museum

Above Lead badges (1300–1500) go on display at London Museum Docklands’ Secrets of the Thames exhibition. Image courtesy of London Museum

Above Mudlark Monika Buttling-Smith searches the foreshore. Image courtesy of London Museum

Secrets of the Thames

London Museum
15 Apr 2025 – 1 March 2026

The London Museum’s crowd-pleasing new exhibition takes as its subject the life vein of the capital, the River Thames, and all the traces of lives that have passed along it. Featuring more than 350 objects found on the river bed – a practice called mudlarking, when items are collected when the tide recedes, twice a day – this fascinating collection gives an account of the city like no other.

Mudlarking is an historical scavenging practice dating back to the 18th century, when Londoners collected items to sell – often a means of survival, but nowadays is a niche hobby. This London Museum show is the first ever exhibition devoted to it. Artefacts uncovered date back to the Roman era, and represent shifts in trade and commerce, everyday life and culture in the city.

Many of the long lost treasures tells mysterious and ominous stories, giving a fresh perspective on London and its life in the past and present, from a 500-year-old knitted Tudor hat, a dagger, and a set of false teeth from the 18th century, to an old poison bottle and an ivory sundial.