Rufai Zakari is celebrated for his brightly colored compositions portraying contemporary individuals from his community in Ghana. His brilliant glossy palette comes from the recycled plastic packaging he uses as material. Conscious of the environmental crisis imposed by the culture of consumerism and industrialization, he diverts this waste from the streets of his hometown to make uplifting works of art. These scraps of plastic —found objects marked with text, logos, and patterns— are skillfully incorporated to form garments, interiors and symbolic imagery. His figures, rendered in jet black, form elegant silhouettes defined by only the most essential details, their subtle contours evoking familiar gestures.

Showcasing Zakari’s most recent works, the exhibition highlights children and adults in moments of leisure and play. Zakari writes, “I extract them from their tiresome daily context and reposition them in an explosion of colors, striking forceful poses, inspired simultaneously by daily gestures and fashion photography.” In these pieces adults recline in oversized inflatable animal floats, children play, and the atmosphere is sanguine and happy. After years of tribal conflict in Ghana, which claimed countless lives and left ruins, Zakari turns toward renewal, envisioning through his art a future filled with optimism.

Rufai Zakari (b.1990) has had work featured in solo exhibitions at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, UK (2024, 2021); San Luis Potosí Center for the Arts, Mexico City, Mexico (2023); Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, Ohio (2023); Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2022); and Gallery T293, Rome, Italy (2022). Since 2014, he has exhibited widely across Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Recently his work has been presented in group shows at the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, West Palm Beach, Florida; The Columbus Museum
of Art, Columbus, Ohio; 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, New York, with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery; Queretaro Contemporary Art Museum, Mexico; Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany; Untitled Art, Miami Beach, with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery; and The Armory Show, New York, with The Breeder Gallery. His work is held in significant private and public collections, including the Pizzuti Collection at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Arthur Lewis Collection, Los Angeles, CA; Easton Capital/John Friedman Collection, New York, NY; Nubuke Foundation, Accra, Ghana; The Bunker Artspace Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; The Ditau Collection, Cape Town, South Africa; Susan Goodman Collection, Brooklyn, NY; VG Collection, Kallakurichi, India; Akron Museum of Art, Akron, OH; JOM Collection, Dakar, Senegal; AMMA Foundation, Querétaro, Mexico; and The Africa Centre Collection, London, UK.

He completed his apprenticeship under Mozzay, a senior artist in Nima, Accra, and in 2011 earned his degree from the Ghanatta College of Art and Design. Zakari, founder of the Rujab Eco-Art Foundation in his hometown of Bawku, Ghana, lives and works between Accra and Bawku.

Contemporary Art Matters is pleased to present Melissa Meyer: Gesture, a solo exhibition of her lyrical abstract paintings and collages. The exhibition highlights a key painting from the 1980s alongside recent works, offering a comparison that reveals the evolution of her practice toward a lighter yet powerful touch. In these paintings, her experienced hand channels emotional, pastoral, and urban energy through free-flowing, script-like gestures and transparent washes of color that glow like stained glass.

The exhibition will be on view at the gallery’s 243 N. 5th Street, Columbus, OH, location from September 11 through October 31, 2025, with an opening reception on Thursday, September 11, from 5 to 7 PM.

Melissa Meyer (b. 1946, New York, NY) is an abstract painter based in New York. She received both a BS and an MA from New York University. Her lengthy exhibition history includes the recent solo exhibition Melissa Meyer: Grace and Me at Contemporary Art Matters, Columbus, OH (2023), and her solo exhibition Throughlines at the Olympia Gallery, New York (2024). She has presented additional solo exhibitions at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., New York; Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, OH; Holly Solomon Gallery, New York; and Galerie Renée Ziegler, Zurich, Switzerland. Meyer’s development has been surveyed in two traveling exhibitions—one originated at the New York Studio School and the second at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her recent group exhibitions include All the Right Notes at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, PA (2024); About Printmaking at Washington Art Association & Gallery, Washington, CT (2024); as well as exhibitions at the David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center, Pocantico, NY; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Texas Gallery, Houston, TX; the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY; and the National Academy of Design, New York, NY, where she is a member.

She has completed public commissions in New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, and at the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Jewish Museum, and many other public and private collections across the United States. Meyer was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation. She is a frequent artist-in-residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, as well as at the Vermont Studio Center.