About Francis Akpata

Francis Akpata is a London-based contemporary artist working primarily through painting. His work explores geometry, perception, colour and spatial transformation through compositions built from disciplined structures: grids, repeated angles, folded planes and rhythmic intervals. These structures are set into tension with colour relationships and subtle irregularities, producing paintings that reward prolonged looking. Forms that initially read as fixed begin to suggest movement, depth and rotation as the viewer changes position or spends more time with the image.

Akpata’s practice is grounded in an interest in how perception is constructed. He is less concerned with depicting a recognisable place than with creating conditions in which seeing becomes an active event. Mathematical order provides the framework, but the work is not cold or purely systematic. Shifts in scale, interruptions in pattern and chromatic intensity introduce uncertainty, allowing rational structure and visual sensation to coexist.

Working primarily through painting, Akpata also explores how his compositions operate when translated into large-scale digital and public environments. The recurring checkerboards, radiating lines and angled planes in his recent work function as instruments for measuring attention itself: they test how quickly the eye settles, where it resists, and how balance can be disturbed without collapsing the composition.

In 2026, three works — As the World Evolves, Inflection Points I and Revealing Angles — were presented digitally in Times Square, New York, through The Holy Art, extending his investigation of optical abstraction into one of the most image-saturated public environments in the world. Akpata continues to live and work in London, developing new paintings that examine the space between structure, perception and transformation.

Artist Statement

I use geometry as a perceptual language. Colour is not simply applied to form; it changes how form is read. A small alteration in contrast, scale or spacing can make a stable composition feel mobile, compressed or open. I want the paintings to remain precise while resisting immediate resolution, so that looking becomes a duration rather than a glance.

The recent works begin as paintings, but I am also interested in how they behave when translated into large-scale digital and public environments. A screen changes scale, speed and context, yet the underlying question remains the same: how does a viewer complete an image through attention? In Times Square, where images compete for instant recognition, I was interested in placing slower optical structures — works that ask the eye to recalibrate. Between the studio and the screen, the work continues to explore how mathematical structure can become an experience of movement, rhythm and spatial transformation.