"My Sculpture, My Life": An iconographic study of the contemporary Ghanaian sculptor, Isaac Opoku-Mensah

Abstract

There is little information on Contemporary Ghanaian artists in the form of literary presentations and documentation. Isaac Opoku-Mensah is one great personality whose contribution to the development of Ghanaian sculpture and the field of bust sculpture deserves to be recognized, celebrated, and studied. This is a biographic study that focuses on his profile and contributions to academia as well as his sculptural art technique. It looks at some of his creative works, the techniques he used, and his influence on his students and the next generation of sculptural artists. The qualitative research design was used to conduct an iconographic analysis of three specific sculptural pieces as part of an empirical artistic study. Research instruments such as in-depth interviews, observation, and photography were utilised to gather the required data for the study. The paper also appreciates Isaac Opoku-Mensah's sculptural pieces through Erwin Panofsky's iconographic analysis, which has three levels: pre-iconographical description, iconographical analysis, and iconological interpretation. The findings among others indicated that there were detailed interpretations of the busts of three murdered Judges, a cocoa farmer, and academic graduands which aimed at comprehending the images’ visual elements and performing a formal analysis of its physical manifestation, followed by an iconographic analysis in which the images were linked to a known story or recognizable character, and finally, an iconological analysis in which the meaning of the artefacts was determined in relation to its social, cultural, and historical contexts.