‘Between Worlds’: Musah Swallah art exhibit in Chelsea shows the transformation of surface into message

Musah Swallah presents a distilled snapshot of his practice across three consequential mediums: canvas, wood, and cork. Each surface carries its own art-historical weight, and Swallah activates them with intention rather than novelty.

Swallah’s work is on display through “Between Worlds,” a pop-up exhibition later this month at Ethan Cohen Gallery in Chelsea. It’s a presentation that understands painting not as trend or gesture, but as inheritance. This is work that arrives fluent in history, confident in material, and unafraid of intensity.

Canvas bears the lush burden of Western painting’s long arc, receiving pigment that is layered, deliberate, and unapologetically full. Wood introduces resistance and gravity, absorbing color differently and recalling African sculptural traditions alongside modernist reconsiderations of support.

Cork, porous and tactile, pulls the work squarely into the present—humble, sensorial, insistently physical. Surface, here, is not a stage. Surface is the argument.

Color does the heavy lifting. Saturated to the edge of reason and pushed past it with discipline, Swallah’s palette operates as structure rather than embellishment. One senses the chromatic intelligence of Matisse, the sensual insistence of Bonnard, and the postwar conviction that color alone can carry psychological and emotional weight. Swallah advances that lineage without hesitation. The eye grows intoxicated, then greedy, then fully surrendered—gluttonous for painterly application and the sincerity embedded in every layer. Pleasure and intellect collapse into the same experience.

Musah Swallah

Swallah’s background matters here, not as résumé, but as foundation. Born in Ghana and shaped by movement across continents, his practice emerges from a diasporic consciousness that treats painting as both memory vessel and contemporary declaration. African modernism, African American abstraction, and Western art history coexist in his work without hierarchy. Influence is not borrowed; it is metabolized. The result is a practice rooted in people and place, yet expansive in reach—paintings that carry lineage forward rather than reenact it.

At the center of the presentation sits the Hijab series, often misread and therefore essential. These works are not religious. They are love letters—radiant, exacting tributes to the dark-skinned beauties of Ghana. The hijab functions as a compositional frame rather than a symbol, amplifying light and intensifying color. Saturation becomes reverence. Portraiture returns to its oldest ambition: to confer dignity through attention. These women are not narrated. They are illuminated.

The artist in the studio works to deepen the conversation. Quieter, inward, and almost devotional, these paintings serve as acts of respect toward African, African American, and broader African diaspora artists who have shaped the visual language Swallah inhabits. Gesture accumulates slowly. Surfaces thicken. Color listens before it speaks. Scholarship resides within the work, without citation or spectacle. Reverence replaces quotation.

Musah Swallah

That this moment unfolds under the stewardship of Ethan Cohen is not incidental. For several decades, Cohen has stood as one of the art world’s most significant figures, championing artists across cultures and geographies long before institutional validation followed. His galleries have consistently privileged rigor over noise, depth over immediacy. By opening his doors for one special night, Cohen extends that legacy—creating a container worthy of work that insists on seriousness.

Presented in collaboration with AA Luxury Atelier and The Curated Reserve, Between Worlds is conceived as a salon rather than a spectacle. The evening unfolds through a guided walkthrough and live conversation, allowing the works to be encountered sequentially and physically. Champagne moves quietly through the room. Dialogue remains measured. The paintings hold their ground.

This exhibition understands intensity as lineage rather than excess. Swallah’s work speaks fluently to the art-historical past—modernism, portraiture, material experimentation—while remaining unmistakably of the present. Contemporaneity emerges through wakefulness, not novelty.

For one night, the Ethan Cohen Gallery, located at 225 West 17th St., becomes a site of convergence: surface and memory, discipline and desire, history and heat. Between Worlds does not ask to be consumed quickly. The work asks to be trusted, lingered with, and remembered.

Event details
Between Worlds: Musah Swallah
Tuesday, Jan. 20, 6-9 p.m.
Ethan Cohen Gallery, 225 West 17th St.
To request attendance, visit artandlux@avalonashley.com