Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’s acquisition of Kwesi Botchway’s Iced Cuban Chain Reflect (2023) and Black Baker Boy Cap (2023).

Kwesi Botchway creates paintings and installations with content and material sourced from Accra, Ghana, where he lives and works. The paintings often feature figures within a domestic scene, looking out at the viewer through a mirror, their gaze refracted during a moment of self-reflection. His subjects are rendered with deep purple-black undertones and red-toned eyes, and special attention is given to lustrous pieces of jewelry, patterned fabrics, and textured surfaces. In Botchway’s compositions, both subject and viewer echo their respective witnessing gazes and are invited to indulge in the act of looking, a pleasure historically denied to the Black body. The portraits imbue their subjects with a sense of presence and style as they unabashedly delight in their own image.