Series: Hero, Father, Friend.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
Read left to right, the triptych stages a family across time using a single vocabulary of props: a carved wooden armchair, textured wallpaper, a pair of boxing gloves hung high on the wall, a framed wedding photograph. In the first panel a boy in a dinner suit and bow tie sits beside an elderly man who holds a cane and wears wire spectacles. The formal black tailoring, repeated on every figure, functions like the dark ground of a nineteenth-century studio portrait, isolating faces and hands and lending the whole sequence the measured air of the commissioned likeness.
The central panel gathers three generations at once. The elder sits at the middle, cane planted between his feet, the same boy at his left, and now a young man standing behind with a hand resting on the old man’s shoulder. Idun-Tawiah arranges them in a compact pyramid, the standing figure supplying the apex, the seated patriarch the base. The wedding photograph on the wall and the boxing gloves above operate as heraldic devices, marriage and struggle, the two poles between which a lineage is understood to have been earned.
The third panel completes the passage: the elder remains seated with his cane while the young man now takes the chair beside him, the boy gone from the frame as though time has folded him forward into the man. Presenting the work as three related images rather than one asks the viewer to supply the intervals between them, to read continuity and succession into the gaps. In the tradition of the dynastic portrait, from Old Master group pieces to studio backdrops across West Africa, Idun-Tawiah locates dignity in repetition, and makes descent itself the subject.