At Godfried Donkor’s studio in south London, a canvas leans against the wall, ready to transport to the Arsenale, where the main exhibition at the Venice Biennale will unfold. At its centre, Caribbean-born boxer Peter Jackson is depicted with angel wings; below him, a dragon and a ship; above, the words “Kumasi” and “Gold”. The backdrop resembles a close-up of the Financial Times’ pink pages, on which numbers sit alongside names: Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Louis Armstrong. Based on the iconography of St Michael vanquishing a dragon, the work stitches together the artist’s many interests, from the history of the slave trade and the African diaspora to superheroes and sport.
At first Donkor considered experimenting with sculpture. “I thought, ‘what’s the biggest, grandest thing I could do?’ I wanted to make her proud,” he says, referring to Koyo Kouoh, who was appointed in 2024 to curate this year’s Venice Biennale but died of cancer last May, aged 57. In the end, he revisited her biennale title, In Minor Keys, reading it as a prompt to resist spectacle and return to the essence of his artmaking. “Minor keys do not scream or force themselves on to you,” he says. “They just carry the tune.”
