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 ” !

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.