‘Terribly courageous’ – Atta Kwami’s glorious posthumous mural unveiled at the Serpentine

The Ghanaian artist was just starting to receive the acclaim he deserved, winning last year’s Maria Lassnig prize. His widow talks about the daunting task of completing his joyous final work

Atta Kwami’s last work is still wet in places from its final retouchings by his widow, who painted it from his design. I sit next to her in the garden of Serpentine North by the many pots of colours she has been using to complete her late husband’s mural. “Our main worry was, ‘Is it an Atta Kwami?’” says Pamela Clarkson Kwami, herself a painter and printmaker. “If you went too far it became a kind of caricature.”

Kwami was a Ghanaian painter and art theorist with a generous, joyous abstract vision whose working life looked set to move into a new gear when he won the Maria Lassnig prize in 2021, an award for a “mid-career” artist that includes a public art commission for London’s Serpentine gallery. Kwami was born in 1956 and spent years teaching and researching before he could afford to paint full-time: a perfect recipient for this anti-ageist art prize. However, Kwami had cancer. He died last October just as his work was beginning to receive the acclaim it deserved – and with his design for a mural at the Serpentine yet to be realised.

Yet here it is and it is glorious. There’s something truly vital about Kwami’s big painting, a dance of rectangles in red, yellow, blue and many more interfolding planes of colour, against a grey bank of early September clouds. It was even better in the sunshine earlier, I am told. It will be great in all weathers, I’m certain, changing with the light and taking on new intensity as winter comes. For this is a painting that promises something: rebirth, redemption, freedom, justice … anyway, good things.

“I was thinking last night of the words that describe his work and you don’t want to say them because they sound naff,” says Clarkson Kwami. “One of them is joy and another is hope. You squirm slightly at the idea of it. But that is a terribly courageous thing to present to the world, isn’t it?”

Speaking to her I start to wish I’d met Atta Kwami. She fights back tears a couple of times yet presents him as objectively and unsentimentally as she can. “He could be a handful. He was very ambitious, and ambition is a difficult thing to deal with sometimes.” But they worked intimately side by side, them against the world: “I’ve been with him for 30 years and we’ve shared a studio and worked in the same space. He was a bit like an exile in his own country when he was in Ghana, partly because of his personality and partly because of the way he was working, which wasn’t necessarily in line with what anyone else was doing. It meant that we had each other and not many other people. We had each other as our main critics.”

The loneliness she sees in Atta Kwami’s life was the price he paid for his originality. As an art historian, he worked out his own idea of modern Ghanaian art that didn’t confine itself to what his widow calls “the academy” but instead embraced this west African nation’s bubbling array of popular art forms. “He took from a lot of indigenous stuff but without being patronising. He really adored the canoe paintings.” These are the traditional hand-decorated sea-going canoes of the Fante people, which are not just ethnographic museum pieces but still in use. He also studied “the northern murals that the women paint – that is amazing. There was one woman and she painted abstract shapes. Atta asked her where she got them, and she said, ‘I sit on the roof and I look at the cows.’”

He loved this easy merging of art and life, the creation of abstract designs from nature, which has been a triumph of African art for centuries. Kwami’s Serpentine mural with its blocky rectangles pays homage to the patterns of Kente cloth, once worn by Asante and Ewe royalty, today more widely available. Yet at the same time it embraces western modern art, paying homage to the pulse of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie.

“He loved paint and so he loved Mondrian,” says Clarkson Kwami. Just as Mondrian delighted in jazz, he found it natural to mix high culture and street art. “He didn’t make distinctions. He found that someone like Almighty God (Kwame Akoto) was really quite innovative.” Almighty God or God Almighty is a witty pop artist of the streets whose signboards such as a painting of a smoking dog with the legend Stop Smoking for it Kills Gradually have brought bold imagery to the streets of Kumasi since the 1970s.

For one of his last projects, Atta Kwami created in Folkestone abstract versions of Ghana’s brightly painted street kiosks. The popular arts he celebrates are resources of optimism, survival, hope: those words his widow admits it’s hard even to say out loud. Her act of love and memory has made his message ring out in a London park. Maybe there should be more versions of this artist’s inspiring work, all over the world.

For Pamela Clarkson Kwami, painting it from his designs and with her intimate knowledge of his work was a way of keeping him close. “Have you seen The Repair Shop? They take things that are sort of meaningful and they get them repaired, and they say that’ll remind me of my grandfather – and I thought, well I’m so lucky …”

Looking at the calming, warm vision before us she feels she got it right. “I think he would have been pleased with it.”

Atta Kwami’s last mural will be unveiled at Serpentine Gallery North, London, on 6 September.