Textiles
TEXTILES: A Dialogue Across Generations
20 November 2025 – 06 January 2026
Ablade Glover & Michael Gah
In Ghana, cloth is never just cloth. It is history, inheritance, identity, the fabric that holds communities together. It marks celebration and mourning, wealth and humility, ancestry and reinvention. It carries stories in colour and rhythm. In many ways, it is Ghana’s most enduring language. Textiles, the dual exhibition by master painter Ablade Glover (b. 1933) and rising artist Michael Gah (b. 1995), unfolds this language across two generations separated by more than six decades of lived experience, yet joined by the same creative pulse. What emerges is a conversation about lineage, joy, community, and the evolving soul of Ghanaian art.
A Thread That Begins With Independence
Ghana became the first African nation to gain political independence from Europe in 1957. Under President Kwame Nkrumah, the young nation embarked on an ambitious cultural programme: artisans were sent to study abroad, in London, Paris, New York, to master their crafts and return home to pass on their knowledge. It was an apprenticeship model designed to secure not only skills, but identity; to ensure that Ghanaian creativity remained rooted, yet global. Ablade Glover stands as one of the finest heirs of that vision. Widely regarded as a founding father of modern African art, his career embodies the spirit of cultural renewal that followed independence. Trained first in textile design in London, he brings to painting the sensibility of a weaver: repetition, rhythm, pattern, and a deep respect for the way cloth captures the soul of a people.
In Glover’s iconic market scenes and urban gatherings, impasto serves as his textile. His palette knife works the surface like a shuttle across a loom, binding colour into motion. The crowd is not a series of individuals but a living tapestry, a community stitched together by movement, trade, and shared presence. Markets in Ghana are more than commercial spaces; they are the heartbeat of social life. Here goods are sold, stories are exchanged, and identities are shaped. Glover paints this pulse, not literally, but atmospherically, creating works that feel woven from the collective memory of a nation. At ninety-two, his mastery remains undiminished. His work, like kente, carries the accumulated wisdom of generations.
Gah — A New Generation Holding the Thread
By contrast, Michael Gah, born in an age of smartphones and globalisation, approaches textiles from another direction altogether. Where Glover work is influenced by textile, Gah literally builds with it. Working with recycled fabrics from Accra’s markets, he cuts, stitches, and layers discarded cloth into exuberant portraits. His practice is rooted in sustainability and beauty, giving new life to materials that have already lived full lives on the bodies of others.
But beneath the surface lies another theme: joy as a universal value system. Gah believes that kindness is often mistaken for weakness, when in truth it requires immense strength. He is fascinated by the emotional landscapes we carry, the way people hurry through cities looking hardened or unhappy without realising it. His figures seem to push back gently against that unconscious tension. A smile costs nothing, yet transforms everything. His portraits embody the glass-half-full perspective, choosing to see the best in people even in a world of human frailty. This emotional generosity is Gah’s contribution to the lineage. His work is, in essence, a practice of visual kindness.
Community — The Meeting Point Between Them
Despite their age difference, Glover at 92, Gah at 29, both artists return again and again to the same idea: community. Markets, gatherings, textiles, shared spaces, shared stories, these form the connective tissue of Ghanaian life. The question that runs through their work is simple, but timeless: What makes a community? Is it shared labour, shared beauty, shared memory, or shared care? “Love thy neighbour,” as Christ said, becomes not a moral instruction but a lived practice visible in their compositions. For Glover, community is a tapestry. For Gah, community is a kindness. For both, textile, literal and metaphorical, becomes the language of belonging.
A Dialogue Woven in Colour and Cloth
Presented together for the first time, the works of Ablade Glover and Michael Gah form a dialogue across generations that mirrors Ghana’s own cultural evolution, from independence, to global modernity, to a new era of sustainability and conscious joy. Their practices differ, but their mission is shared: to honour the beauty of Ghanaian life through the material and metaphor of cloth.
One weaves pigment, the other sews pattern. Together, they remind us that art, like community, is built thread by thread.
FEATURED ARTISTS
ABLADE GLOVER
Professor Ablade Glover stands as a testament to the timeless nature of creativity. As one of Ghana's most influential artists, he enters his ninth decade with a remarkable body of work that reflects his acute perception and profound appreciation for the vibrant world around him.
MICHAEL GAH
A contemporary artist born and based in Accra, is undoubtedly one of Ghana's most thrilling portraitists of our time. What sets him apart is his captivating medium - he creates larger-than-life, hyper-coloured figurative works using strips of endemic fabrics.