Biography

The son of a Ghanaian father and a Hungarian mother, yet raised in the affluent town of Wassenaar, the Netherlands, Lawrence Kwakye grew up amidst an intriguing mix of social and cultural backgrounds.

He made his first oil painting at thirtheen whilst on holiday in Switzerland. Even after graduating in Industrial Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven and working as a professional designer, Lawrence never stopped painting. In 2009 his passion guided him to commiting himself fulltime to the art of painting.

The cultural and social diversity Lawrence experienced in his upbringing left an unavoidable and distinctive mark on his work as a painter.
His observations of modern daily life are filtered through a lens that fuses the magic realism of Ghana with the nostalgia of post-communist Hungary and Dutch calvinism. The contradictions and tensions that occur at the crossroads where emotions, intuitions and rational analysis meet the brutality of time, seem to drive his work.

Using an almost American cinematic style of narrative painting, Lawrence struggles with the relentlessness of time passing as it leads to irreversible change and finally death. What once was is now lost as time thunders past without compassion. Perhaps it is this compassion that Lawrence seeks to find in his paintings.

In his latest series titled ‘the Quiet’ he uses blurred images and film scenes to create a suggestion of movement whilst at the same time highlighting subtle focal points where time seems to stand still - deliberately or randomly. Our attention is drawn to what appears to be a familiar situation but where something is about to happen. Or has just happened.