2026
ADP: Hey Sena, what art world advice would you give to your younger self?
SB: To my younger self. Not to others.
- God is King
- They say it is hard, but its actually easy. You just have to do the work and avoid the noise.
- If it must be done, it must be done well. (My dad said that to my siblings and I when we were kids.)
- You can do it too.
- If you had no worries or cares, would you still make this decision?
Biography
Working from Accra, Sena Burgundy Appau makes paintings that refuse to let the viewer remain a stranger to themselves. He constructs vast speculative worlds populated by luminous blue figures, beings painted at a scale that puts them in direct confrontation with the viewer: close, commanding, inescapable. Their skin is built from blues that function as light itself, cool luminous tones rising against the deep gravity of black and grey. Their forms are caught mid transformation, neither fully human nor fully other. They exist at the boundary of the knowable, just beyond the edges of settled identity. These are not portraits of people but of states: the self in flux, multiplying, arriving at itself through chaos rather than despite it.
His practice draws on science fiction, Jungian philosophy, and the experiential charge of cinema, the way great films briefly suspend reality and make the full scale of human possibility feel attainable, channelling that heightened state onto the canvas through colour, presence, and painted light. The paintings are dense with internal architecture: figures that count, compositions that hide their own logic, colour deployed not for beauty but for pressure. Hot fields of orange and red push against deep blacks. The canvas feels like it is holding something back. The question underneath every work is the same: who are you when nothing is written?
Appau works in acrylic at a scale that forecloses passive looking. He wants the encounter to feel like something is at stake, because for him, it always is.
A finalist for the 2025 Ellipse Prize and the 2025 Kuenyehia Prize, his work has been shown internationally at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami in 2022 and The Mix in Accra in 2024, and is held in institutional collections in Ghana.
Art Dot Prompt is a digital platform that issues prompts to global art world practitioners, documenting and unearthing the underlying intelligence that shapes contemporary practice. Founded by Dela Anyah.
Art Dot Prompt © 2026 by Art Dot Prompt, Dela Anyah and Contributors is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
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