Daniela Frimpong-Mansoh

Daniela Frimpong-Mansoh was born in Vienna in 1985. Her family comes from Ghana. She says she grew up “with two cultures that are both very close to my heart.” And she wants to express this in her paintings. She wants to convey cultural similarities and contrasts. Her roots flow into her work, often in subtle ways: as a trace, as a rhythm, as a fragment of a multifaceted identity. Her paintings are created purely intuitively. The creative process involves pouring paint freely onto the canvas—spontaneously, unplanned, raw. For her, this is a way of releasing an inner state. Only afterwards does she carefully develop structure and order, layer by layer, in order to find a balance between chaos and form.

Intertwined figures often appear, which are neither rigid nor complete, but rather show fragments of lively inner states. For her, these figures are mirrors of emotional worlds and human relationships—of togetherness and opposition, of closeness, vulnerability, and separation. Masks serve to stage and conceal identity and represent the resulting emotional tension. The aim is to explore
desires for representation and hidden inner truths. From 2019 onwards, Frimpong studied for several years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she developed her visual language but ultimately broke away from the student context. She paints, as she says, “constantly.”