Serge Attukwei Clottey
Serge Attukwei Clottey (b. 1985, Accra) is an internationally recognized Ghanaian artist working across painting, sculpture, installation, photography and performance. His practice examines the intertwined histories of trade, migration, water scarcity, environmental degradation and material consumption in contemporary Ghana.
Clottey is best known for developing “Afrogallonism,” a distinctive artistic language centered on discarded yellow plastic jerrycans, locally known as Kufuor gallons. He cuts, perforates and binds pieces of this material into monumental, tapestry-like installations, transforming an object associated with water shortages and global oil distribution into a powerful symbol of adaptation, exchange and community resilience. Across his wider practice, personal and political narratives remain closely connected to the streets and coastal communities of Accra.
Clottey has participated in Desert X in California and Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia, and his work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Palm Springs Art Museum, Iziko South African National Gallery and Royal Museums Greenwich. In 2019, he received an Honorary Doctorate of Art from the University of Brighton.
Provenance
Part of the 'Sex and Politics' series, 'Body and Mask' juxtaposes the industrial kuffuor gallons often used by Attukwei Clottey in his sculptural and performance works against the human form - connecting the politics of water scarcity to the experience of the individual. In the Sex and Politics series of pastel drawings, Clottey reflects on his own social media engagement and its proliferation of one-sided relationships where on one end a persona can be cultivated by an “influencer” or “user” and is received on the other by a “follower.” In To Be A Man the artist abstracts the tendency of western ideals of masculinity spread by social media to influence the preoccupation of contemporary men living in countries such as Ghana and the Congo with new ways of communicating wealth and virility.