PRESS RELEASE
UNKNOWN BRITISH ART GENIUS DEBUTS IN AFRICA AT AGE 67
(Accra, 5 Februrary 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. 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
ENDS.
EDITORS’ NOTES:
ABOUT THE GALLERY: Annobil Contemporary was founded by Ishmael Fiif Annobil, the Ghanaian poet, multi-award-winning filmmaker, art critic, photographer, emblemist, drummer and digital composer. The gallery is dedicated to celebrating artistic genius across borders, and updating the role of Africa on the international art scene, 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. Crucially Annobil Contemporary springboards new artistic talent. Set around the upmarket Trasacco Area of East Legon, Accra, Annobil Contemporary incorporates Obsidian Tavern, a bohemian watering hole that doubles as a second art gallery.
BIOGRAPHIES:
HELEN ANNOBIL: 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 till 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, journalist and filmmaker, with whom she has two children, Brendan and Nana Yaa. She moved to Ghana in 2023 with hher husband and son.
KOFI SETORDJI (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 in 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. He has carried out important public commissions, including 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.