By John Owoo
(In Accra – Ghana)
Ghanaian artist Nana Bruce is back at Gallery 1957 with a new body of work that extends his deeply personal exploration of self-love and the often turbulent path toward it.
Through figures suspended in moments of emotional transition and shadows acting as second selves, Bruce constructs a contemplative space—one free from judgement or instruction, yet charged with opportunities for private reflection and unflinching honesty.
His figures are bright, inviting, and familiar, enabling their shadows to speak with their authority. They are weighty, insistent, and impossible to ignore. Indeed, he steps directly into a space of tension, where outward appearance and inner truth converge, clash, and reshape one another.
Bruce invites viewers into this charged zone not simply as observers, but as participants in their introspection—encouraging them to embark on the uncertain, yet profoundly rewarding, work of learning to love oneself.
That process is rarely a straight line. It unfolds in fragments—raw, fractured, shifting, but always holding the possibility of forward movement. His figures embody this unfolding: some poised at the brink of revelation, others adrift in denial, yet all navigating—however hesitantly—the layered terrain of the self.
Frequently adopting a bird’s-eye perspective, Bruce positions us above his subjects, making us witnesses. This elevated view creates distance, yet demands focus. We look down not with detachment, but with care—watching, as though observing someone (perhaps ourselves) in the tender act of self-repair.
Undeniably, the works interrupt and narrate. In one piece, a shadow reaches for love as the figure recoils; in another, it lifts its gaze beyond the present moment, suggesting clarity on the horizon—a self ready to rise, to risk, to grow. These shadows give form to what is suppressed, voice to what is feared, and gentle pressure toward what is true.
His figures are built from layers of unexpected colour—reds, blues, violets, browns, greens. What at first might seem like black skin reveals, upon closer study, a symphony of undertones. This approach recalls the principles of incarnato, where skin is conceived not as a flat surface but as a field of emotional and symbolic depth.
It is through this same logic of layering that the bare form emerges—not as spectacle, but as emotional unveiling. Here, nudity is not merely the absence of clothing, but the stripping away of persona, performance, and defence. Freed from costume and context, the body becomes a site of reconstruction—a space for vulnerability, clarity, and the possibility of beginning again.
Titled “In the Name of Love: Introspection”, the exhibition ends on Thursday, September 11, 2025.
