Search Results

(b Saïda, Algeria, 1953).

French painter, sculptor, photographer, film maker, writer and installation artist of Algerian birth. Born to Spanish parents, he was much affected by North African as well as Southern European culture. He trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre. Despite a pervasive and diverse use of media, Alberola often stressed the coexistence of his different artistic practices as leading to painting alone. His paintings relied heavily on evocative narratives, at once personal and ‘historical’. Alberola conceived of his role as a storyteller, on the model of African oral cultures. Convinced that narratives could not be renewed, he argued that a painter’s main task was to reactivate his work through contact with his pictorial heritage. The main points of reference for his paintings of the early 1980s were Velázquez, Manet or Matisse, whose works he quoted in a personal way. In the early 1980s he undertook a series of paintings inspired by mythological subjects, which he combined with his own history as the principal subject-matter of his work. The biblical story of Susannah and the Elders as well as the Greek myth of Actaeon provided his most enduring subjects, both referring to the act of looking as taboo, as in ...

(b Johannesburg, 1959).

South African sculptor and installation and multimedia artist. Though Alexander trained as a sculptor at the University of the Witwatersrand, earning a Bachelor in Fine Arts in 1982 and a Masters in 1988, she nevertheless pursued a variety of artistic disciplines, regularly employing photomontage and sometimes using video in her practice. While working towards her Masters’ degree, she produced Butcher Boys (1985–6), an iconic work from this contentious era in South African history. The sculptural tableau presents three monstrous, grey nude male figures built from plaster over a gauze core and glazed with oil paint. Seated casually on a bench, their heads strikingly combine human and animal forms, with twisting horns and sealed-up mouths. While Butcher Boys, like many of the artist’s works, responded to its socio-historical context, Alexander typically has not produced explicitly political work or supplied interpretive statements, preferring pieces to remain open-ended in their meanings....

South African, 20th–21st century, female.

Born 1959, in Johannesburg.

Photomontage artist, sculptor of assemblages, installation artist.

Jane Alexander completed a Master of Arts in Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 1988. She has been professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, since ...

(b Luanda, 1963).

Angolan sculptor, installation artist, and curator. Alvim began exhibiting internationally in the 1980s, at such shows as Africus, the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale; the 1997 Bienal de Havana; and Dak’Art ’98. His mixed-media pieces are powerful, haunting works through which he explores the memories and scars left by the trauma of growing up in a war-torn country. He generally evokes life in Luanda: displaced peoples, failed hopes, the patchwork organization of the urban space. In his overwhelmingly dark scenes, neon light illuminates found objects surrounded by canvas or metal, often superimposed with photographic images, creating a psychological intensity. Crosses, skulls, and maps predominate in his work of the early 1990s. In 1997 he collaborated with Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa and South African artist Gavin Younge in a project that brought them to Cuito Canaval, a Cuban-Angolan community and former battle site, to comment on the devastating effects of war suffered there. This sojourn resulted in a touring multimedia exhibition ...

(b Cairo, May 22, 1963).

American painter, sculptor, fibre and installation artist of Egyptian birth. Amer, one of the few young artists of African origin to gain prominence in the late 1990s international art scene, studied painting in France at the Villa Arson EPIAR, Nice (MFA, 1989), and the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Art Plastique, Paris (1991). She subsequently moved to New York. She is best known for her canvases in which paint and embroidery are combined to explore themes of love, desire, sexuality, and women’s identity in a patriarchal world. Amer’s use of Embroidery, historically regarded as a genteel female craft, to create images of women fulfilling their sexual desires without inhibition, recalls the provocations and strategies of 1970s Western feminist art. However, her work also reflects her alarm at the incremental curbing of women’s social and political freedoms in her native Egypt following the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, especially after the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser ended in ...

(b Anyako, Ghana, June 13, 1944).

Ghanaian sculptor, active in Nigeria. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sculpture (1968) and a postgraduate diploma in art education from the University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana (1969). After graduation he taught at the Specialist Training College (now University of Winneba), Ghana, in a position vacated by the eminent sculptor Vincent Kofi. From 1975 he was Professor of Sculpture at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Anatsui’s practice often makes use of found objects including bottle caps, milk-tins and cassava graters. However, he is not concerned with recycling or salvaging; instead he seeks meaning in the ways materials can be transformed to make statements about history, culture and memory.

His early work consists of ceramic sculptures manipulated to reconfigure pieces of memory. In 1978 he began his Broken Pots series, which was exhibited the following year at the British Council in Enugu, Nigeria. Several of the ceramic works were made of sherds that were fused together by a grog-like cement of broken pieces. Making art historical references to ...

Togolese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 12 April 1975, in Lomé.

Sculptor (mixed media).

Komivi Assangi followed courses in drawing and painting in the studio of Kodjo Aho from 1994 to 1997 before turning to sculpture. His compositions are assembled from old tools and utensils, planks of wood, jute sacking, nails and lengths of string. He has showed his work in group exhibitions, among them at the Goethe institute in Lomé in ...

South African, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1956, in Montagu (near Cape Town).

Sculptor, mixed media artist. Assemblages.

Willie Bester was born into a mixed race family under the apartheid regime. In 1986, he studied art part time at the Community Arts Project (CAP) in Cape Town, an anti-apartheid art group, and became a full-time artist in ...

(b Douala, 1962).

Cameroonian painter, sculptor and installation artist, active in France. He moved to Paris in 1974 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; he began exhibiting in the late 1980s, showing in France, Switzerland, Spain and Greece, among other places. Unlike many African artists living in Europe, he never felt dislocated. His sculptures, canvases and installation pieces combine all manner of found objects and other material that he manufactures himself. With these he comments on issues of representation and artistic practice in the Western world, at the same time evoking the presence and/or absence of humans, and therefore memory. The objects he uses are symbolic as well: eggs signify renewal, for instance. His compositions are simple and striking, as is his use of colour. In one work, for example, a ‘mummified’ figure appears on each side panel in the same thick white paint as the ground, holding a red rose against a metal plate. Against the black centre panel is an orange dress, under which are white flowers....

South African, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1974, in Pretoria.

Sculptor, printmaker, installation artist.

Wim Botha graduated from the University of Pretoria with a BA (Visual Art) in 1996, and lives in Cape Town. His work is usually controversial because of its iconoclastic nature, for example, he deconstructed the typical style of well-known South African artist J.H. Pierneef and of classical portrait busts, and he uses recycled Bibles to sculpt Christ figures. He has received a number of prestigious awards, including the first Tollman Award in ...

Senegalese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1952, in Louga.

Sculptor of assemblages, installation artist.

Moustapha Dimé settled in 1966 in Dakar, where he studied sculpture. From 1973, he travelled to Burkina Faso, the Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo and Gambia, where he got to know various forms of traditional art and became fascinated with the mystical and spiritual dimensions of art works. In ...

Moroccan, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active in France.

Born 1950, in Casablanca.

Painter, sculptor, sculptor of assemblages, draughtswoman, illustrator.

Sylvia Elharar-Lemberg studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the art teachers training college in Tel Aviv. Her paintings and drawings create the effect of transparency and obliteration, often starting from the square design of a tetragram. She also creates assemblages, such as mysterious grills, iron rods placed alongside labels and photographic plates. Sylvia Elharar-Lemberg has shown at group exhibitions in France since ...

Zimbabwean, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1956.

Sculptor (stone), assemblage artist. Figures, animals.

Tapfuma Gutsa began his studies at the Driefontein Mission School in Zimbabwe under the guidance of the sculptor Cornelius Manguma. He was awarded a British Council bursary that enabled him to study at the London School of Art ...

South African, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1975, in Cape Town.

Sculptor, installation artist, performance artist, draughtsman.

Nicholas Hlobo, who lives in Johannesburg, graduated with a BTech: Fine Art degree at the Technikon Witwatersrand (now University of Johannesburg) in 2002. The sudden explosion in South African art (post ...

(b Diré, Feb 1, 1953).

Malian painter, sculptor and installation artist. He was trained at the National Institute of Arts, Bamako (1976), and the Superior Institute of Arts, Havana (1978–85). His colourful figurative paintings are relatively abstract, with thick paint revealing brushstrokes. In 1992 he began making political statements with his work, investigating themes as general as the social role of artists or the intersection of modernity and heritage, or as specific the massacres in Rwanda, Bosnia and Angola. His Homage to Mande Hunters (1994) is a large wall hanging to which cowry shells and amulets are attached. In other pieces he employed eggs to convey the fragility and vulnerable precariousness of human life; in one, a large rock is suspended over rows of eggs in a bed of sand. Konaté sees himself as the keeper of tradition; for him, being a contemporary artist does not have to mean forgetting the past. He participated in the Havana Bienal and Daka Biennale, and in ...

(b Zambesi River, nr Victoria Falls, Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe], Feb 23, 1921; d London, Jan 1, 2006).

British painter, sculptor, conceptual artist, performance artist, video and film maker, of Rhodesian birth. He studied at the Chelsea School of Art, London, from 1946 to 1950. His concern from 1954 was not with the production of art objects as an end in itself but with various processes and consequently with the recording in three dimensions of sequences of events and of patterns of knowledge. In 1958 he introduced torn, overpainted and partly burnt books into assemblages such as Burial of Count Orgaz (1958; London, Tate), followed in 1964 by the first of a series of SKOOB Towers (from ‘books’ spelt backwards), constructed from stacks of venerated tomes such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, which he ignited and burnt. The destruction and parody of systems of knowledge implied in Latham’s work was apparent in 1966, when he organized a party at which guests chewed pages of Clement Greenberg’s book Art and Culture...

South African, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1964, in Witbank (Transvaal).

Sculptor, assemblage artist.

Art Brut.

Sibusiso Mbhele took part in Contemporary Art of South Africa ( Un Art Contemporain d'Afrique du Sud) at the Galerie de l'Esplanade in La Défense in Paris in ...

(b Kinshasa, 1968).

Congolese installation artist, sculptor, and painter, active also in Belgium. Aimé Mpane’s work explores themes of identity, urban life, and colonial history. Mpane utilizes the interplay of light and shadow as well as the multicoloured layers of plywood to bring attention to layers of history and memory present in Congolese identity. His work reflects his own experience of frequent travel between Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as well as a larger awareness of colonial history and its continuing impact on the Congo region.

Mpane was born in Kinshasa, the son and grandson of wood-carvers. In Kinshasa he attended the Institut des Beaux-Arts, where he received degrees in Sculpture (1987) and Monumental Painting (1990). From the 1990s Mpane split his time between the DRC and Belgium, and received his MFA in Painting and Tri-Dimensional Research in 2000 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Visuels de La Cambre in Brussels. After ...

(b Freetown, Sierra Leone, Dec 14, 1965).

Australian installation artist, born in Sierra Leone. Resident in Australia from 1972, Piccinini graduated in 1988 from the Australian National University, Canberra, with a BA and then from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, in 1991 with a BA (Painting). She produced images and objects that embodied imaginary evolutionary jumps and mutations (see, for example, The Young Family; see image page for more views). To produce these, she worked in a succession of new, novel materials and media: from synthetic resins, plastics and silicone developed for special effects in movies to the digital manipulation used in commercial photography and animation. In her 1997 series of photographs, Protein Lattice, a naked female plays with a large hairless rat with an enlarged human ear growing from its back. The work combined the highly contrived language of mainstream fashion photography, brightly lit, glossy and free of imperfection, with an animal that appeared to be one of the hybrid clones then emerging from laboratories. Both glossy-haired model and mutant rat appear equally artificial and equally indebted to technology....