While most established artists who started out in graffiti move on to something more pictorial, Augustine Kofie’s evolution went in the other direction. The artist, inspired by the geometry of letterforms early on, abstracted the building blocks of graffiti until there was no semantic meaning left, leaving us with geometric forms that faintly echo the structure of the letterform. Kofie’s work takes from the avant-garde of the past century. While his color palette of mustard yellows and mossy greens evokes 1970s kitsch, his geometric forms, mapped out with mathematical precision, recall the high-velocity compositions of Futurists like Kazimir Malevich.
Augustine Kofie will be in a three-person show, “Three the Hardway,” alongside Jerry “Joker” Inscoe and Christopher Derek Bruno, opening November 7 at Breeze Block Gallery in Portland. The three artists are members of the Transcend graffiti collective and share a mutual love for geometric abstraction. Take a look at some shots from Kofie’s studio by Sunny Phono below.
