At Art Paris African art galleries from Europe and the African continent showed their new works:

Artist Billie Zangewa with her beautiful hand sown collage  at South African gallery ArtNova. Getting pretty pricey! She has been showing her work for a long time and was included in museum shows but her work had not grabbed people’s attention like this time  in Paris.  People were lining up for her work! Part of this success comes from her long relationship with her gallery.

Omar Ba from Senegal Zone de non droit, 2017. He showed at Parisian Galerie Daniel Templon. I just love his work! So uniquely his! He has developed his own unique vocabulary rooted in local imagery and mythology while contending with global issues.

Remy Samuz’s wire sculpture Maternity, 2016 from Benin showing at Galerie Vallois. I have seen other artists doing work with wire like that but this piece makes me feel like I am seeing the figures in a dream.

Tiwani gallery director Maria Varnava concentrates on her work surrounded by the large mix media canvas by  Gareth Nyandoro from Zimbabwe and  Angolan Delio Jasse’s photographic series.

Mario Macilau from Mozambique  striking photograph at Ed Cross Fine art located in London.

A superb El Anatsui was hanging at London based October gallery. I wanted to grab it and take it home. A bit expensive though!

Nigerian artist Nnenna Okore‘s wall hanging Hide at October gallery . I interviewed her several years ago and wrote a post on her which you can find on my website and I am happy to see that her work is getting more exposure.

There were a lot of good work at the October gallery. Here is the work of Alexis Peskine Wolot Cosmic, 2017. I had not seen his work before or not paid attention , I am not sure, but this time I saw three portraits by him. Dramatic images, with a chiaroscuro effect conveyed through a painterly use of  nails  (yes it sounds strange but when you get closer you see a lot of nails)and moon gold leaf. His work was also shown at the exhibition at the Parc de la Villette, “Afriques Capitales ” and at the salon Zurcher Africa at La Galerie Africaine.

I stopped in front of Gosette Lubondo‘s photograph Imaginary Trip at L’Agence a Paris. She is a young emerging artist from Kinshasa (DRC) who was included in the Kampala Biennale. What a fantastic way of conveying yearning !

Namsa Leuba‘s series Zulu Kids was shown at Art Twenty One, a Lagos exhibition space. She favors a theatrical approach with an aesthetic informed by fashion and design sensibilities. There is something highly incongruous and unsettling in seeing this child isolated on a plinth in a barren landscape and whose dress and body paint points to traditional rituals.

I liked French born and of Algerian descent Dalia Dalleas Bouzar series of portraits at Galerie Cecile Fakhoury. These portraits based on photographs of women taken during the Algerian War infused these women with a regained dignity. They had been required to take off their veil at the time to create identity cards and they had experienced this public exposure as deeply debasing. Bouzar paints them here adorned in gold.

I was very taken by the work of a young Tunisian young woman Aicha Snoussi at A.Gorgi Gallery from Tunisia. Her drawings in  Le Livre des anomalies were exquisite, at times provocative. She had bought old school note books with pages that had turned slightly yellow with age and light and drawn in each one of them a set of intricate drawings emanating from an imaginary singular universe. Each book was laid down on a shelve along the wall of the gallery. Intense, edgy, Snoussi revealed to me her unusual mind and even weird perspective, at times microscopique and at times largely spatial. She goes from creating these minute drawings to entire wall drawings. She impressed me with her unusual imagination, utter joy in the creative process and  artistic breadth.. She is a young talent that deserves to be followed.

Moving on to London, I trekked to see Ibrahim Mahama sculptural work at the White Cube gallery. While Mahama’s work has been extremely well received I have only liked it at the 2015 Venice Biennale where the stitched together cast-off  jute sacks  were draped along the pathway in the Arsenale. For once the visual effect was as compelling as the conceptual underpinning of his work. The installation was fantastic. So I arrived at White Cube with mixed feelings. I actually was pleasantly surprised. There was more variety of texture, and shape in his wall hangings. I felt compelled to look closer and discover the intricacy of the layering.

The next sculptural installation,  a precarious assemblage of thousands of small shoe boxes made from found material to which was added other repurposed items such as heels, hammers was phenomenal. Precarious but strong! It was organized chaos.  No discernible pattern could be identified, it was an endless jumble of shapes, colors, and materials exemplifying ‘Mahama’s inquiry into the life of materials and dynamic potential.’

Moving from the grand scale of Mahama’s sculpture I ended my exploration with the delightful exhibition of drawings  of South African artist Lisa Brice at Stephen Friedman gallery. All drawn in cobalt blue gouache they offered an intimate portrait of feminine power and sensuality. I had never seen her work but I left totally charmed.

By then I was “arted out ” !

In May The African Art Fair 1:54 was again with us New Yorkers in Red Hook, Brooklyn at Pioneer Works. The mix of artists was different than last year making the fair an opportunity for discoveries for New Yorkers and I found works that peeked my interest.

It was very well attended and therefore a great opportunity to network. A series of talks curated by Koyo Kouoh, founder and artistic director of Raw Material Company, Dakar had also been scheduled and I learned more about other creative web ventures – TrueAfrica and OkayAfrica – that focus on promoting African arts and culture and aim to reach the young hip African generation. Being cool is their motto! And it is working! They have a large following on the African continent. Most of them started for the same reason I did my blog: a desire to correct a mostly negative portrayal of the continent by focusing on the enormous creative energy that infuses the continent. Professionally run their writers are often based on the African continent, giving the fresh and dynamic reporting the perspective of an insider.

While run increasingly professionally I felt it fell short at being as exciting as the 1:54 edition last fall in London. Smaller, it represented a limited sample of what is happening on the African continent. While Red Hook is a cool location it is actually an awkward space and a few galleries found themselves assigned pathways/passages in lieu of booths where the works were not shown to their best advantage.
Walking into the fair I found myself immediately absorbed by the work of Omar Ba who had a solo showing at the Art Bartschi & cie booth. His work was just fantastic. I have written about his art before and it is with pleasure that I see his painting becoming more self-assured. The usually slightly chaotic scenes are more structured yet keep their highly patterned quality and imagery that references tribal decoration, natural fauna, self-styled leaders, and factional warfare. His characters loom larger, closer to the surface almost spilling into our space minimizing the psychological distance between the turbulent worlds he evokes and our present circumstances.

“His work was mostly sold by the beginning of the opening night” said the gallery attendant with satisfaction. Owning two of his earlier works I am particularly pleased that he is doing well though that also means his prices are going up and getting a new piece may be a bit more expensive. I also have to contend with more competition! While still represented by Art Bartschi in Switzerland he has changed galleries in Paris and is now with Daniel Templon.

Em’kal Eyongakpa’s photographic installation at Apalazzo gallery was the next work to catch my eye. I was not quite sure what was going on but I found the enigmatic interweaving of reality and illusion in the forest setting particularly intriguing. I felt the same way as when I read poetry. My senses are awakened, I am drawn by the dreamy quality and the elusive meaning is what makes me feel challenged and leads me to ponder my reactions.

Hanging on the opposite wall two of Edson Chagas conceptual photographic self-portraits where his head is covered by carrier bags were a reminder that rampant consumerism is taking over urban Africa. I thought the one with the words “World of Hope” turned upside down particularly appropriate these days!

One of Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze’s drawings was hanging at Mariane Ibrahim gallery. She creates these fantastical scenes that have a collage aesthetic where imaginary characters that she calls aliens or hybrid creatures engage in mysterious and playful activities. As she explained during one of the Fair’s panels much of her work is anchored in the idea of play. Yet through out her work and as she constructs these new paradigms she also addresses contemporary issues of displacement and hybridity. She is getting a lot of attention these days. She is one of the finalists of the Prix Canson Sixth Edition whose works are being shown at the Drawing Center in Soho, New York City. Njideka Akunyili Crosby is the other finalist of Nigerian descent. I am thrilled to see African artists’ work being shown at the Drawing Center!

Kenyan multi-disciplinary artist Jim Chuchu’s photograph tinged with eroticism where a man seems engaged in some mysterious ritual is part of a body of work that attempts to reconstruct future-past anonymous deities, their devotees and forgotten religious rites. Being gay and therefore rejected by the local prevailing religions Chuchu invents new religions and rituals that are inclusive of gay people.

Hanging in the back of Jack Bell’s booth, in his storage corner, was a lovely wall hanging “ God Save The King” by Gastineau Massamba from the Republic of Congo. Here an Okapi, a native animal to Central Africa and a national icon is beautifully and sparingly embroidered on a broad sheath of linen speckled with delicate flowers. The whimsy of the piece was enchanting and I was seduced. However it is the story behind the work and the artist’s choice of medium that moved me deeply. Massamba has chosen embroidery in part because that particular process helps him contend with the recurring war traumas that he has been living through. Part art / part therapy: a magical mix.

In a totally different vein just around the corner at Richard Taittinger hangs the work of Frances Goodman from South Africa from her recent solo New York show Rapaciously Yours. Her wall sculptures made out of acrylic nails looked like scaled creatures at once beautiful and yet also somewhat creepy. I preferred her car seat sculpture where she sews on the worn cover of a car seat a text using pieces of fake diamonds that speaks of sex workers mixed feelings as they lose their innocence while gaining sexual power. The contrast between the refinement of the glittering text and the roughness and coarseness of the car seat was what caught my attention at first. Once I knew the underlying story I was even more intrigued. I liked the feminist tone and there was a little of Tracy Emins’ sexual provocation and aesthetic but with even more of an edge and without her narcissistic undercurrent. Boy! Did that take me back to my teenage years in Paris where hookers were part of daily life in my posh neighborhood, the 16^th arrondissement. I would notice the same hooker regularly pull into our street in her green car, presumably service her customer and then drive away. We were not shocked, it made for a good story but mostly it made me aware of other lives, other realities that were not so easily dismissible.

The work of painter Beatrice Wanjiku at Artlabafrica is edgy,  aggressively disturbing. She paints howling figures that are struggling to break out from the constraints of straightjackets and become metaphors of human struggles and pain.. There is no holding back here. Her paint is applied thinly and has the transparency and looseness that one would associate more with watercolors and as a consequence the resulting image has a blurry quality almost like a dream; maybe more a nightmare in this case. All facial features dissolve into a big black howl. She is an artist who deserves our attention!  I find her  raw and direct. She makes herself totally vulnerable and the work is that much more convincing for it.

I felt that the works displayed at Anne de Villepoix, a French gallery that has been showing African artists for many years, were strong. She offered a mix of recently produced works but also earlier works (early 2000) conveying a sense of history and scope to contemporary African art. A striking 2001 photographic diptych “Static Drift” by Ingrid Mwangi was hanging over the fireplace. Born in Kenya, daughter of a Kenyan father and German mother she was transported to Germany in her teens where she has settled and is now married to a German artist, Robert Hutter, with whom she works closely. In this work she uses her body as canvas. She addresses personal issues, such as her constant discomfort because of her mixed race status of always feeling the odd one out whether she is in Kenya or Germany – never black or white enough – and of broader issues of nationalism, colonialism and post colonialism. She challenges preconceptions of the African continent by showing it as a white shape and refers to the past colonial might of Germany by making it proportionally much larger. However the words she uses point to a different reality: of an African continent on the rise and of a Germany in decline. In the context of today’s current events this work made in 2001 seems prescient at least in terms of Germany’s aging population and slowing economy in contrast to Africa’s higher growth rate and growing population. However as with everything in life reality is more of a mixed bag. Economic growth in Africa while stronger than in Europe is not keeping pace with its population growth on the continent and many of the young are seeking jobs up in the Global North.

Mwangi’s use of her naked body to speak of boundaries evokes other thoughts in my mind. I think of the history of desire for the “exotic” or for the one that is different from oneself, and of how the female body has and is still in some cultures seen as the territory of men.

Here Mwangi reclaims her body. As she says: “ My body is the only thing that I own…I react, interpret and question the clichés and stereotypes with which I am faced..I use art to awaken consciences.”

Some other strong pieces graced Anne de Villepoix’s walls:

Barthélemy Toguo,

Omar Ba,

and Yashua Klos.

It was a first in London for Axis Gallery that had participated in 1:54 in New York and I was intrigued by the installation by Hervé Youmbi Two-Faced/Double Visage from his project Faces of Masks and while not quite successful visually I found it thought provoking. In this project Youmbi purposefully blurs boundaries between the ethnological and the contemporary, and between distinct tribal styles challenging systems of classification that have been historically favored by Western museums. He commissioned the Bamileke craftspeople from Cameroon to create a hybrid Ku’ngang mask incorporating the face of a Dogon mask from Mali. Once the chief of the Ku’ugang Society authorized the mask it was then activated during a ritual masquerade, which Youmbi filmed. One of the masks included in the installation incorporated Edvard Munch’s Scream: another example of hybridity. In reality ritual masks from some tribal African groups have morphed along the centuries and have absorbed elements from other cultures. For instance early 20^th century Yoruba Gelede masquerade masks incorporate colonial figures, and later elements of modernity such as bicycles. Museums have had a tendency historically to favor less hybrid pieces but things are changing. Also I just reviewed an exhibition of George Osodi’s photographs of Nigerian Monarchs where the contemporary and the ethnological were held in tension through out. It is good of Youmbi to challenge any simplistic or essentialist approach.

Axis was also showing the work of Jebila Okongwu.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a whole room dedicated to the poetic photographic work of Mohamed Camara. This is a lovely body of work that he did a few years back and sadly he has not produced new work since then as far as I know.

I liked the work of Zak Ové at Vigo gallery. Assemblage and collage are used for expressive means.

Here he finds objects that he picks up from the Thames and assembles them.

Aboulia and Armand Boua at Jack Bell gallery,

Beatrice Wanjiku at Artlab gallery

Délio Jasse at Tiwani Contemporary

Nemsa Leuba at Art Twenty One

Mimi Chereno Ng’ok at the Fondation Donwahi; she is showing at Les Rencontres de Bamako currently.

Billie Zangewa

Clay Apenouvon at Mariane Ibrahim, a gallery from Seattle whose presence on the international art scene is on the rise.

A few words of caution I feel need to be said. It is great that Contemporary African Art is getting much more attention in the West and that an international market for these artists’ work is taking shape. The only problem is that the pricing shifts to reflect an international pricing and gradually the works will be too expensive for a local middle-class African audience who already is slow to wake up to the idea of buying and supporting its contemporary artists.

Omar Ba’s paintings present a colorful, fantastic, at times chaotic world where the order of things as we perceive them in the visible world is turned on its head. Giant plants tower over a miniature human world gripped by globalization; huge mother and father figures become hybrid godlike creatures at once terrifying and seductive because of the sheer beauty of Omar Ba’s craftsmanship and decorative use of saturated color.  His highly imaginative personal imagery fuses personal metaphors and ancestral symbols that reflect the animist belief that all plant, animal and human life has a soul. His symbolism is charged with meaning and builds a narrative around political themes critical of the power systems that exists in Africa. Omar Ba works well on a small scale and delivers a powerful message but I also like the ambitious and more complex visions reflected in his large scale works which strive to integrate multiple time, spatial and psychological realities though a juxtaposition of skillfully painted vignettes. These vignettes coexist on the same plane physically, but through shifts of scale defying traditional perspective they shed light on the layered meaning of his paintings and reveal what lies beyond appearances. There is a formal push and pull effect that draws the viewer in and requires time to fully apprehend the full meaning of the painting.

His paintings are done on simple cardboard and present a mix of oil paint, gouaches and ink. Omar Ba always blackens the cardboard with black opaque paint at times layering it with a coat of white feathery, slightly iridescent brushstrokes. While content matters here I was also enchanted by painting passages, which revealed Omar Ba’s love for the process of painting and skillful use of decorative elements.