PRESS RELEASE
UNKNOWN BRITISH ART GENIUS DEBUTS IN GHANA
(Dateline: Accra, 25 March 2026)
Annobil Contemporary Gallery, Ghana’s newest art gallery, launches with Helen Annobil: Terra Firma, a major debut exhibition by an unknown English fine art genius, Helen Annobil. It is a phenomenal tale of the artist’s self-discovery and rebirth in Ghana, and the resolution of her approach, after about sixty years of quite development as an artist-nurse in England. Hence ‘Terra Firma’, alluding to the fact that she found her feet in Ghana.
This unprecedented exhibition features work spanning the three short years Helen Annobil has been in Ghana, 2023 to 2025. The homeland of her husband, Ishmael Annobil, Ghana swept her off her feet with its deeply expressive, unmanicured landscapes, dynamic roadside culture, brave architecture, disarming openness, musicality, ritual, and its unapologetic relationship with colour. These factors colluded in opening up and energizing her palette, literally.
The result is pure power: expressionistic and surrealistic landscapes and still life moments, captured in a single day or two, on bigger canvasses than she had ever attempted before. The works exemplify Helen Annobil’s penchant to subverting proportionality, symmetry, and perspective. If there are any echoes of European masters such a Turner, Constable, Kandinsky, Monet, etc., they are merely evidence of a common European artistic vernacular that she updates robustly.
Curated by the pre-eminent Ghanaian artist, Kofi Setordji, Helen Annobil : Terra Firma is guaranteed a place in Ghanaian and indeed world art history. Winner of the Leisure Award Sculptor of the Year Prize, 1990 and recipient of the inaugural Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship, in 2008, Setordji’s curatorial approach to Terra Firma celebrates the diversity of Helen Annobil’s palette, highlighting in a stylish, unlaboured way her various styles, themes and use of colour.
“Helen obviously paints from the heart, and with joy. She is a powerful painter with a spellbinding vision. She interprets the Ghanaian landscape with her remarkable mastery of colour and audacity. This is a historic exhibition for Ghana and Britain, and I am proud to be its curator,” says Kofi Setordji.
Terra Firma is a mould-breaking statement on all fronts. The mentality, rationale and vision behind the works are purely Helen Annobil’s own, seeded in her childhood by her talented artist and poet father, Maurice Jackson. This is underpinned by her shrewd and masterly technique, an eye for visual narrative, poetics, humour and exquisite imagination, and majestic use of colour. Any echoes of the European greats such a Turner, Constable, Kandinsky, Monet, Lautrec, are merely evidence of a common European artistic language — vernacular.
“I feel fortunate to have been able to develop my own voice out of my seminal influences, including my father’s, and to be able to contribute my bit to British art history, to Ghanaian art history, and to world art history. My works in Terra Firma were inspired almost exclusively by Ghanaian landscapes and flora. It is inevitable – I live here and I love Ghana. My art landed on solid ground here,” says Helen Annobil.
As an autodidact, Helen Annobil’s expressive language stems from a highly sensitive internal cosmos. She doesn’t suffer the pessimism of academic orthodoxy or mediation, so she is fearless when pushing the boundaries of art. Furthermore, Helen Annobil’s practice is purely organic, without conceptual bureaucracy, but deeply conceptual in essence, on her own terms. Though her ‘stream of consciousness’ and blinding speed tend to disguise that innately conceptual underpinning.
Commenting on the exhibition, the founder of the gallery, Ishmael Fiifi Annobil, renowned art critique, poet, award winning filmmaker, and Helen Annobil’s husband, enthused:
“Annobil Contemporary was set up as a dynamic showcase for art from all cultures. Terra Firma establishes that dream indelibly, and raises the bar for art curation in Ghana. Touchingly, the artist in our inaugural show is my own wife, and the curator is my high school classmate — it is touchingly personal.”
Helen Annobil: Terra Firma runs from 28 March till 30 May 2026
ENDS
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EDITORS’ NOTES:
ABOUT THE GALLERY: Annobil Contemporary was founded by Ishmael Fiif Annobil, the Ghanaian poet, multi-award-winning filmmaker, art critic, photographer, emblemist, and digital composer. The gallery is dedicated to celebrating great art across borders, while updating the role of Africa from that of supplier of art to the outside world, to that of a centre for international exposition. Through this strategy, the founder challenges the hackneyed definitions of African art which continue to distort its meaning to this day. Annobil Contemporary incorporates Obsidian Tavern, a bohemian watering hole that doubles as a second art gallery, and The Kiln, a gift shop boasting exquisite traditional pottery and other craft. It has an open-house policy which encourages spontaneous performance, recitals, and artisitic intervention.
PRESS CONTACT: Ishmael Fiifi Annobil | E: director@annobilcontemporary.com | Tel: +233 (0) 5300 36168
PRESS IMAGES DOWNLOADS: https://annobilcontemporary.com/press-room-2/
BIOGRAPHIES
THE ARTIST: Helen Annette Annobil was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, England, in March 1958. She started drawing and painting at a very tender age, under the tutelage of her father, Maurice Jackson, a teacher, artist and poet. She trained as a nurse at the age of nineteen, and practiced on a full time basis till her retirement in 2022. Helen’s paintings often display a strong expressionistic, or interpretative tendency. She is a purely imaginative artist, whose oeuvre is extraordinary in its diversity, not to mention her vigourous and sophisticated execution. Most of her pieces are painted in less than six hours, shot through always with surefooted inventiveness and urgency. She is comfortable in all mediums and media, which she mixes freely. She is married to Ishmael Annobil, the Ghanaian poet, art critique and filmmaker, with whom she has two children, Brendan and Nana Yaa. She moved to Ghana in 2023 with her husband and son.
THE CURATOR: Kofi Setordji (born 1957) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Ghana. His works range from graphic design, textile designing, sculpture and painting. Setordji was born in 1957 in Accra. He won the Leisure Award Sculptor of the Year prize,1990. In 2008, he received the inaugural Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship, alongside Mona Hatoum, and Shahzia Sikander. He was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Nubuke Foundation in 2012. He apprenticed with prestigious with iconic Ghanaian artist and dramatist Saka Acquaye between 1984 to 1987. He has since shown in France, Italy, Denmark, Germany, Austria, South Africa and the United States. His important public commissions include the iconic Entre Amies, a five-meter his sculpture outside the National Theatre of Ghana, Accra. His international renown can be traced back to his audacious installation work, Genocide, inspired by the Rwanda Genocide of 1994.
THE FOUNDER: Ishmael Fiifi Ayerebi Annobil is a Ghanaian poet, journalist-critic, multi-award winning filmmaker, photographer, artist, emblemist, and digital composer. He was born in 1958, in Accra, Ghana, where he started writing poetry at the age of eleven, and entered journalism soon after high school. He has lived in the Sudan and Kenya, where he performed his acclaimed recital for the homeless and landless, Criers on The Thresholds of Reality (Nairobi 1983), and worked as a reporter, before moving to England as a correspondent, in the same year. In 1987, he moved with his family to Wales, where he founded the international poetry festival, Festival Iolo (formerly Iolo’s Children), and Wales’ first serious arts newspaper, Circa21. He is the founder of online arts journal Chiaroscuro Magazine, and the celebrated London film collective, Stonedog Productions (London).
Ishmael Annobil’s film practice has centred on artists and art practices, starting in 2007 with his seminal film In The Presence of Awe – The Transvangarde (art documentary), Kenji Yoshida – Artist of the Soul (art documentary), Hornsleth: Product of Love (documentary). In the last ten years, his practice has been dominated by his highly prolific collaborations with American minimalist Linda Karshan, including the multi-award winning Linda Karshan: Covid-19 Conversation, Linda Karshan: Choreographing the Page (documentary), and Equilibrio a documentary about Linda Karshan’s groundbreaking Exhibition at Abazzia Di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. The pair also founded the trailblazing new genre, Walked Drawing, enacting masterpieces in historical spaces and academia, Cambridge University and The Coutauld Institute, and the British Museum. In 2023 he co-directed with his daughter Yaa Annobil the award winning film, Insomnia, about his night photography of London, based on the eponymous monograph.
Ishmael Annobil has published three books of poetry, Seven Horn Elegy (for his father), Ethiop and Bardo: Parable of Tomorrow (poems for woman), and one music album, Zingliwu. His forthcoming books include Portrait of a Man in Pain (novel), and Inklings of Clay (historical novella). He is the creator of Abëtëi, a body of philosophical emblems for the Gadangme people of Ghana, which he views as his greatest achievement. A master photographer, his images have been published in various publications, including The Independent Newspaper, and prestigious French magazine M3. He attended Christian Methodist Secondary School (Accra, Ghana), studied Social Anthropology extramurally at Goldsmith’s College, and undertook a PgDip in Visual Communications at West Herts College. He now lives in Ghana with his wife and son.