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 ” !

Gor Soudan’s approach is essentially conceptual. He greeted me in his new small studio not too far from the Circle Art Agency. He came to art by way of his passion for philosophy. Translating an idea, concept or observation into material form and letting the process of making  and the properties of the materials (wire, ink, metal) intuitively guide him are two of the guiding principles of his working process.

I first encountered Gor’s work in 2013 at the 1:54 Fair in London at the ArtLabAfrica’s booth. He was making figurative sculpture out of “protest wire”: fragments of the human form that felt deeply poetic in their incompleteness and nest-like forms. Gor favors working with materials he finds in his surroundings and at that time he was working out of a space in Kibera, a large slum on the edge of Nairobi and was recycling this wire which was left over from burned car tyres set afire during earlier riots.

His work has been well received and he is now able to afford his own space, which while  small by Western standard, is a real treat for Gor. He tells me how he used to weave the wire while sitting in a chair with the wire resting on his knees.

Equating this weaving process to drawing in space his subsequent investigations into drawing on paper were a logical move for him.

Currently he is particularly drawn to the Arabic wood carvings that one finds in Lamu and he is incorporating some of their patterns in his recent drawings.

I later went on to pay a visit to Michael Soi who has a studio in the GoDown art center situated in an abandoned industrial complex.

Known for his biting critique of China’s increasing presence in Kenya – his work is mostly satirical and critiques Kenya’s social, economic and political contemporary situation – he is currently pointing the finger at the rampant sex industry in Nairobi.

Deeply aware at the corruption crippling Kenya at all levels and seeing his art as an agent of change he deliberately makes his work explicit and easy to read. He wants his audience to get what he is saying. He paints cartoon-like scenes with flat and bright colors. His work resonates with a younger audience in Nairobi and as Danda says “ He brings a young dynamic Kenyan crowd because they get what he is doing. It’s social commentary, it is cheaky.” Next door to his studio is his shop where he sells totes that bear his signature style. A successful business it provides him with a safety net: “ I paint what I want to paint. I can do this because I have a safety net!”

Other artists to follow are:

Paul Ondoti

Jackie Karuti

Mimi Cherono Ng’OK

Muchiri Njenga

Nandipha Mntambo, born in Swaziland in 1982 and raised in South Africa, is a sculptor who has made cowhide her medium of choice.  Her choice is informed on one hand by a childhood dream where she found herself left with a pile of cowhides and on the other by her interest in science and forensics, which was her first passion before she decided to become an artist.

She makes plaster moulds of her own body and envelops them with the still malleable cowhide that she has thoroughly cleaned and cured.  The hide forms become empty floating receptacles, at once beautiful and repulsive. These hairy feminine shapes defy our notion of feminine beauty. Nandipha Mntambo remembers her early years at girl schools where there was so much focus on getting rid of body hair. With her haunting floating figures, simultaneously human and animal like , she deliberately seeks to provoke a sense of unease.  She describes her use of cowhide “as a means to subvert expected associations with corporeal presence, femininity, sexuality and vulnerability.”  The animal/human association is not new but rarely has it been so provocative. The cowhides seem to be worn as garments caught in movement. As Mntambo explains in the video, the many folds and creases were inspired by the move of the dress worn by a woman dancing the Paso Doble with her partner. Here Mntambo addresses issues of gender, which are also at the core of her work.  She has more recently expanded her work to include video and photography where she explores further associations tied to the cow iconography. Mythology plays an important part and helps position her work in a broader geographical context.

Nandipha Mntambo completed a Master of Fine Arts from the Michaelis School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town. She was the 2011 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner for visual arts and she has been shown in group shows in the US, Europe, Africa, and Australia.

Interview with Nicholas Hlobo by Diane Frankel

Nicholas Hlobo cuts, tears, punctures and resews varied materials such as paper, black inner tube, satin ribbon, leather, textiles that are rich in associations and creates drawings, sculptural installations and performances where he explores issues of personal identity, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, origins and colonial history. As Hlobo explains in the following video, he makes the seam, which he highlights by using bright satin ribbon, central to his work by giving it metaphorical significance.  In his drawings he wants to make a mark but instead of using a pen he chooses a sharp object and makes a scar. The action is more violent and the following process of sewing is a process of mending, of repair. Sean O’Toole speaks of the seam as “ the defining metaphor of Hlobo ‘s work, grafting histories and reconciling opposites.”

Hlobo’s drawings are a visual delight: imaginative, intricate and provocative. Increasingly they are gaining a sculptural quality as threads and other materials spill out of the frame onto the wall reaching the floor. His sculptural works often made out of black inner tube with its association to industrialization and urban growth feel more aggressive and invasive yet are tempered by the yielding quality of the rubber material, the softness of the textiles and Hlobo’s general unwillingness to be fully explicit and lay things bare.

Hlobo was born in Cape Town in 1975 and belongs to the Xhosa culture. He tends to title his works in Xhosa. Asked about the reasons of his choice, he responds:

“ It opens up worlds that are closed. It challenges the notion that art making is a purely western tradition and should solely exist within the constraints of the English language.  It challenges the idea that English is the best way to communicate. Most of my work requires curiosity, to look a bit further. The visual language is universal but most work is informed by a personal way of seeing. My work speaks of my place of origin and makes reference to my South African history.”

Nicholas Hlobo is a rising international star. He was included in the 2011 Venice Biennale, was chosen in 2010 by Rolex for the Mentor and Protégé program with Anish Kapoor, and has been included in the Paris Triennale, Tate Modern, and Palazzo Grassi.

The first time I saw Nnenna Okore’s work was at the Newark Museum and I found it very poetic and compelling. Hung from the ceiling, transparent strips of shredded burlap dyed with clay like color, felt tactile and earthy yet paradoxically also ethereal and majestic. That dichotomy intrigued me.  Shortly there after, I found myself in Chicago where Nnenna Okore lives and works.  I got in touch with her and scheduled a visit to her studio at North Park University where she teaches.

Nnenna Okore completed her B.A in painting in Nigeria where she was the student of El Anatsui. It was under his guidance that she refocused her studies towards sculpture, which she studied at the University of Iowa completing an MA and MFA. She is now an Assistant professor at North Park University in Chicago.

Okore recycles discarded materials and objects and transforms them into intricate sculptures. While her work highlights the wastefulness of our consumerist society I feel that it is firmly grounded in nature, in the processes of birth and decay, in other words, in life cycles whether it be a tree, an object or her own body as it ages. This awareness of life processes informs her choice of materials. During our conversation she told me that as a young child growing up in southeast Nigeria in the town of Nsukka, she would walk through the rural communities and be on the lookout for objects, either man made or from nature, in partial decay whose texture and shape intrigued her.

I wanted to learn more about her working process. Okore showed me some of her burlap pieces at first and explained how she made them.

Listen to the follow video to hear her working process.

Making art is for Okore a very physical experience. Just as she saw women in her childhood community engage in repetitive daily tasks, she weaves, sews, rolls, twists, and dyes. She responds to the nature of her chosen material whether it is burlap, plastic, paper, or clay and rope and adapts her process. She takes what comes to her and works with it. The process is organic and she speaks of “ collaborating with the material”.  When she creates a large sculptural installation she starts with a broad idea of how it is going to look but no specifics.  The context and the nature of the chosen material play as much a role in determining the end result as her intervention. She has until now very much refused to take full control. However, in one of her more recent pieces, her approach is shifting and she is imposing more structural elements and deliberately aiming for something more visceral.

Finally we walked into the back room where one of her large clay pieces was rolled up and lying on the floor against the back wall. As we unrolled it, hundreds of small rolled clay pieces woven into burlap revealed themselves. This had obviously taken Okore hours to do.  While the sculpture seemed to not have a particular shape – it looked like a  very large wall hanging-  when she showed me how she installs it, I understood the second part of her working method. It is in the installation process that many of her pieces undergo a final shaping as she gathers the material in a particular way or hangs the panels on different planes sculpting the space.

The exhibition “ Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures” at the Metropolitan Museum curated by Dr. Alisa LaGamma, gathers pre-colonial sculpture from eight landmark sculptural traditions from West and Central Africa created between the 12^th century and the 20^th century. Focused on sculptural forms that commemorate important leaders, it dispels the reductive view of African art as being uniform and simplistic.  It offers insights into a rich variety of forms and styles ranging from abstract to fully naturalistic and highlights a skilled and sophisticated artistry. These sculptures are also the only testament to these influential leaders who would have only been known through oral history.

No longer seen as timeless abstractions of generic archetypes, these objects are reconnected in this exhibition to their local context and oral history. Through an intelligent and effective use of photography and video a better understanding of the role of these sculptures is achieved.  Through out the exhibition period postcards (late 19^th century) link regional leaders to specific sculptural forms and photographs by Paul Gebauer (Cameroon) taken in the early part of the 20th century give further indication of the context within which these sculptures existed. A contemporary video entitled “ Cameron – The Golden Days of the Kingdom” by Manuel Zips-Mairiitsch and Werner Zips brings to life the regional rituals and illustrates the king or eminent leader’s function as the spirits of the elders’ conduit. Furthermore, photographs of similar objects in situ and as essential elements of ceremonial sites help to illustrate how they were displayed and used. These images help temper the preciousness conveyed by the museum’s exhibition format.

Establishing a broader context, a parallel is set between the early African (12th and 16^th centuries from Nigeria and Ife) sculpted heads and the tradition of the Roman bust and the Egyptian sculptural tradition as commemoration of a leader’s legacy. It is helpful to remember that those regions of West Africa were exposed through the trading routes to other artistic traditions coming from the West and the East.

The shift from the naturalistic portrait-like heads, though idealized, from Ife (Yoruba people) and Benin ((Edo peoples) to the abstracted heads from the Akan people is dramatically highlighted. This shift was probably the result of the weakening of those earlier civilizations, increasing conflicts and waves of invasions.  The Memorial head done by the Akan peoples (Kwahu traditional area, Ghana 19^th/20^th century) shows a dramatic abstraction of the head which has been reduced to a two dimensional disk. The forehead is also very broad. These features reference the effort of Akan mothers to shape the head of their infants through carnal massage. Most of these heads were done by female artists and represent women leaders. Of note is the attention to particularities of the leaders being commemorated despite the definite idealization of the earlier pieces and the abstraction of the later ones.  Examples offer many variations in facial markings linked to the specific character of the leader being represented.

The full figure becomes the focus of the rest of the exhibition.  The powerful, dynamic and full-bodied figure of a priestess from Cameroon (Bamileke) is another reminder that women leaders were also subject of praise and veneration. The coarseness of the carving and roughness of the finish of these tall and life size figures from the Grasslands contrasts with the smooth, shiny finish and sophisticated carving of the smaller seated figures from the Chokwe people (Angola). These sculptures of hunters had to be of a more modest size because the Chokwe people were always on the move and the sculptures needed to be transportable. Men of action, the Chokwe showed themselves with over sized hands and feet.  I could not help thinking of Picasso’s figures from the 1920’s with the same over sized extremities. The exhibition culminates with the lusingiti, majestic sculptures from the Hemba people (DRC). Twenty-two examples are positioned in a circle as if partaking in a ritual. The elongated, serene figures feature larger heads and long torsos reflecting the Hemba’s beliefs and values. Though all very similar, these masterpieces exhibit subtle distinctions which are a reminder that they were connected to specific leaders.

The exhibition ends with a series of photographs by Phillis Galembo of contemporary leaders, which has become the new accepted way of commemorating leaders in the 21st century.  It is a reminder, already alluded to in the beginning of the exhibition that this tradition of creating commemorative sculpture of important leaders started to fade with the advent of photography. Photographs soon became the preferred means for commemoration and veneration after death.