A New Generation of Contemporary African Artists

The founding movements of modern African art gathered around a workshop, a teacher, or a single city — Oshogbo, Tengenenge, Kinshasa's sign-painting studios. The artists who came after them, born mostly between the 1970s and late 1980s, share no such common address (...)

Where the Oshogbo School, the Shona sculptors and the Congolese popular painters each grew out of a shared workshop or a founding master, the generation that followed them took shape without one. Born mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, in the decades after independence and, in several cases, through the civil conflicts that followed it, these artists arrived at their own materials and subjects individually — some through formal training, most through necessity — rather than inheriting a school's visual vocabulary.

Three of them share a city and a generation without sharing a style. Aboudia (Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, born 1983) began painting the streets of Abidjan as the 2011 Ivorian civil war unfolded around him, his raw, graffiti-dense canvases recording the skirmishes and children's turf-marking tags he witnessed directly. Armand Boua (born 1978), working the same city, turns found and salvaged materials into images of Abidjan's forgotten street children, a subject he returns to as a form of testimony to West Africa's ongoing political violence. Yéanzi (born 1988), the youngest of the three, trained first as a traditional portraitist before abandoning the form for a technique of his own invention: melting discarded plastic collected from Abidjan's streets directly onto canvas, turning the city's waste into the material of its own portraiture.

A second pair of artists, both born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, answer their country's history in very different registers. Steve Bandoma (born 1981) builds collaged, shape-shifting portraits of Kinshasa's inhabitants from recycled advertising imagery, acrylic, watercolour and ink, giving his figures a raw, unstable energy. Zemba Luzamba (born 1973), by contrast, paints in a more classical oil technique, his scenes of leisure and political ritual masking, beneath their composure, the tensions of a country he watched pass through the upheavals of the 1990s.

Misheck Masamvu (born 1980, Zimbabwe) belongs to the first generation to come of age after his country's independence. Trained first at Gallery Delta in Harare and later at the Kunstakademie in Munich, Masamvu moved from an early realist style toward a gestural, expressionist mode of painting that addresses Zimbabwe's political and economic turmoil directly, using discomfort as a means of holding his audience's attention rather than easing it.

What connects this generation is not a shared teacher or a single movement's name, but a set of overlapping conditions: independence and its aftermath, conflict at close range, and materials — plastic waste, collage, salvage — chosen rather than inherited. Where their predecessors built schools, they built individual, often improvised languages of their own.

AFRICAN|CONTEMPORARY features several artists from this generation, including Misheck Masamvu, Armand Boua, Aboudia, Steve Bandoma, Zemba Luzamba and Yéanzi, with original works available to view, discover and acquire directly from the gallery.