Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
One Size Only / 61 x 76.2 cm / 24 x 30 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 boy in the chair gives us the full weight of his gaze, and it is the steadiest thing in the room. A blue comb stands upright in his hair like a little flag nobody thought to remove; the cape, a sheet of cool cobalt, falls from his throat to the floor and turns him into one calm column of colour. Around him the shop hums with style — the barber in his black porkpie hat and pale-blue smock, leaning in with a jeweller’s concentration, and the friend at the left propped against the wall in a flat cap and a thrifted cardigan, looking off as though he has heard this conversation before.
Idun-Tawiah loads the back wall with both desire and instruction: a grid of hand-painted barber’s charts, each head a catalogue of the cuts a man might wear, flanked by a lettered LOVE and the colours of two flags. It is a wall about looking — at other men, at the selves you could style yourself into — and the picture takes its cue from it. Everyone here is being watched and knows it. The barber watches his hands, the seated boy watches us, the third figure watches some private middle distance, and what holds them is the easy, unspoken intimacy of men who share a room.
The image belongs to “Boys Will Always Be Boys” (2023), Idun-Tawiah’s vibrant reckoning with the friendships of his own Accra boyhood, and what keeps the scene clear of nostalgia is its appetite for surface — the nubby weave of the cardigan, the watch riding the barber’s wrist, the way the blue cape rhymes with the blue smock so the two men wear the same note without touching. He stages the barbershop as a theatre of black boyhood, where grooming is a form of care and a haircut is a small rite of belonging. He does not sentimentalise it. He simply lets you stand close, and look, the way the boy in the chair is looking back.
The boy in the chair gives us the full weight of his gaze, and it is the steadiest thing in the room. A blue comb stands upright in his hair like a little flag nobody thought to remove; the cape, a sheet of cool cobalt, falls from his throat to the floor and turns him into one calm column of colour. Around him the shop hums with style — the barber in his black porkpie hat and pale-blue smock, leaning in with a jeweller’s concentration, and the friend at the left propped against the wall in a flat cap and a thrifted cardigan, looking off as though he has heard this conversation before.
Idun-Tawiah loads the back wall with both desire and instruction: a grid of hand-painted barber’s charts, each head a catalogue of the cuts a man might wear, flanked by a lettered LOVE and the colours of two flags. It is a wall about looking — at other men, at the selves you could style yourself into — and the picture takes its cue from it. Everyone here is being watched and knows it. The barber watches his hands, the seated boy watches us, the third figure watches some private middle distance, and what holds them is the easy, unspoken intimacy of men who share a room.
The image belongs to “Boys Will Always Be Boys” (2023), Idun-Tawiah’s vibrant reckoning with the friendships of his own Accra boyhood, and what keeps the scene clear of nostalgia is its appetite for surface — the nubby weave of the cardigan, the watch riding the barber’s wrist, the way the blue cape rhymes with the blue smock so the two men wear the same note without touching. He stages the barbershop as a theatre of black boyhood, where grooming is a form of care and a haircut is a small rite of belonging. He does not sentimentalise it. He simply lets you stand close, and look, the way the boy in the chair is looking back.