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. It is a phenomenal tale of the artist’s self-discovery and rebirth in Ghana, and the resolution of her approach, after over fifty 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, between 2023 and 2025. Ghana, the home of her husband, swept her off her feet with its deeply expressive, unmanicured landscapes, dynamic roadside culture, superb architecture, its 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, through the majestic use of colour. Here and there, the viewer may see slight echoes of European masters such a Turner, Constable, Kandinsky, Monet, Lautrec, among others. But these are merely evidence of a common European artistic language — vernacular — that she updates robustly.
The mentality, rationale and vision behind the works in Terra Firma 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.
Furthermore, Helen Annobil’s practice is purely organic, without conceptual bureaucracy, but deeply conceptual in essence, in her own way, though her ‘stream of consciousness’ and blinding speed tend to disguise this conceptual underpinning. As an autodidact, her expressive language stems from a highly sensitive internal cosmos. She doesn’t suffer the pessimism of academic instruction or mediation, and she is therefore fearless when pushing the boundaries of art.
Curated by the preeminent 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 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 styles, themes and her 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 Great Britain, and I am proud to be its curator,” says Kofi Setordji.
Commenting on the exhibition, the founder of the gallery, Ishmael Fiifi Annobil, renowned art critique, award winning filmmaker and Helen Annobil’s husband, said:
“Annobil Contemporary Gallery was set up as a dynamic international showcase for art from all cultures. It is one of kind, and this remarkable exhibition sets the bar for the future.”
Helen Annobil: Terra Firma runs from 28 Februrary till 31 May 2026
