Serge Attukwei Clottey

Clottey was born in 1985 in Accra, Ghana. He studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra from 2000 to 2004, then received a scholarship to study art in Brazil at Escola Guignard in Belo Horizonte. By his own account this Brazil stay lasted about three months, and he returned to Ghana in 2006. Back in Accra, he began developing the practice that would define his career: cutting, drilling, and wiring together fragments of yellow plastic gallon containers, originally used across Ghana to transport water during shortages, into large-scale tapestries and installations. He also founded GoLokal, a performance collective that stages public interventions using found materials and costume.

Clottey has called this body of work Afrogallonism, using the discarded containers to examine water politics, consumption, and the long history of global trade that runs through Ghana. In 2019 he received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from the University of Brighton. His work has been shown in major public art contexts, including Desert X in the Coachella Valley in 2021 and Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia in 2022, and along The Line art trail in London the same year. He continues to live and work in Accra, Ghana.

Clottey's critical reputation rests on his material: repurposed plastic read simultaneously as a record of Ghana's water infrastructure, a comment on global consumer waste, and a trace of the colonial shipping routes that first brought these containers to West Africa. His 2025 to 2026 solo show at Gallery 1957, "[Dis]Appearing Rituals," was reviewed in Frieze as a continuation of that project, extending his interest in ritual, performance, and collective labor alongside the sculptural tapestries. His inclusion in large-scale public art programs such as Desert X and The Line has broadened his audience beyond gallery walls, and the 2019 honorary doctorate from the University of Brighton is the clearest institutional recognition of his practice to date. No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for direct quotation in this profile.

Clottey's auction market is thin and concentrated in the early 2020s. His recorded high is GBP 340,200 (roughly USD 460,000 at the time), paid at Phillips London in 2021 for a work from his Fashion Icons series, a result that was reported at the time as a new benchmark for the artist. Other public sale results tracked by auction databases sit well below that figure, often in the low thousands to tens of thousands of pounds, which means the 2021 result should be read as a peak data point rather than a stable market level. He is represented by Gallery 1957, which has staged his exhibitions in Accra and London, and by Brigade Gallery in Copenhagen. Jane Lombard Gallery in New York also presented a solo exhibition in 2026.

Clottey's market is young and its public auction record is short, so any single result, including his 2021 high at Phillips, carries outsized weight and should be treated as a data point rather than a trend line. There is no catalogue raisonne, and public museum permanent-collection holdings are not clearly documented; what is confirmed is a long and growing list of exhibition venues rather than confirmed acquisitions. For now, the most reliable path to verification and current representation is direct contact with Gallery 1957 or Brigade Gallery.