The CHRISTOPHE PERSON Gallery is pleased to host Joseph Kojo Hoggar’s first monographic exhibition. Joseph Kojo Hoggar was born in Ghana in 1999, freshly graduated in Visual Arts from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). He is one of the brightest elements of his generation.
The Vanities exhibition reveals his work inspired by the Old Masters classical works of art history and his fascination for the figure of the smoker. His first year of study at KNUST, Joseph Hoggar, devoted it to the theme of the cigarette smoker, the tobacco roller, and the consequences of smoking on his own body: red eyes and black lips. His observations support his perception, widespread in Africa, that tobacco makes you impure. He included these marks in his compositions, and his first works attempted to represent the interior of smokers’ houses. Subsequently, his paintings were inspired by the still lifes of the old masters, loaded with symbolic objects similar to those of the Dutch Vanities.
There are objects of curiosities, lanterns, fruits, oranges, symbols of exoticism as it was perceived in the 16th and 17th centuries and skulls, symbols of death in all civilizations. This fascination for European Old Masters emanates as much from his university courses as from his personal research.
The Water Maid is an interpretation of The Milkmaid by Vermeer. The figure of the maid is pouring water from a glass container in a white ceramic bowl. Water in most cultures is symbolic of purification. On the table are placed other symbolic objects such as an empty wine glass, which symbolizes fragility and death; fruits, perishable foodstuffs, already wasted; bottled wine, a phallic image of one who lives a wasted life. Finally, the skull on the table is representative of the fatality of life. The two ends of butts in front of the skull put the final point of the representation of a woman in the service of a man, whom she deludes himself that he will be able to change his life for the better, when we have all the clues that he wastes his.
VANITIES exhibition by Joseph Kojo HOGGAR will take place from March 16 to April 8, 2023, opening on March 16 at 6 p.m. (registration required).
39, rue des Blancs-Manteaux 75004 PARIS
