Wiz Kudowor, Ghanaian 

Wisdom "Wiz" Kudowor was born in 1957 in Takoradi, the fourth largest city in Ghana, and studied art at the College of Art at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi. He graduated in 1981 with a first class honours degree in fine arts and now lives and works in his artist studio in Dzorwulu, a part of Accra, the capital city of Ghana. Wiz Kudowor has been exhibited in solo and group shows for almost 30 years with exhibitions in Africa, Europe, Asia and the U.S. His works are held in prominent public and private collections like the Ghana National Museum, the Ministry of Culture in the People's Republic of China, the Osaka Prefecture Contemporary Art Collection in Japan and the Africa-America Museum in Dallas, Texas, U.S. One of his widely known artworks is the public Relief Mural at the Kwame Nkrumah Museum in Accra, Ghana, which he installed in 1992.

Wiz Kudowor is today known as one of the leading contemporary visual artists in his home country Ghana. Some art critics have discovered Cubist and Futurist shapes and designs in his paintings, but despite their modernism the artworks of Wiz Kudowor simultaneously rejuvenate traditional forms and aesthetics of Ghana's cultural history. Wiz Kudowor uses ancient symbols and aesthetic elements derived from Ghana's rich cultural heritage as an artistic tool to highlight space and structure colourful configurations on his canvasses. Wiz works with a foam roller and a palette knife and creates strongly coloured and intense paintings which combine styles, themes and expressive patterns from different cultural backgrounds in a way which made art experts describe Wiz Kudowor as a "transcultural visionary".