Our first artist is one of the most well-known African contemporary artists working today: Chéri Samba. Samba was born in 1956, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and his work is included in major international collections from the Centre Pompidou to the MoMA. He says, "my painting is concerned with people's lives, I want to change our mentality that keeps us isolated from the world, and I appeal to people's consciences."

In this painting, Samba expresses the idea of communication, spoken in tongues. The Earth is resting on one of the tongues and different races of humanity are represented in this one painting, College de la Sagesse, meaning "wisdom of knowledge." Adding text to the image was a way for Samba to incentivise people to take their time to read and really engage with the painting.
Samba has been the main subject of his artwork since the 1980s. His oeuvre shows great imagination entwined with depictions of everyday life in Kinshasa - where he’s based - it is also determined to be accessible and connect to local and international audiences alike.

In Le secret d’un petit poisson devenu grand, for instance, you see Samba with a fish-tail surrounded by ears. For Samba, this becomes a representation of finding your path, listening to your voice and your heart, and at the same time the importance of listening to your fantasies, here represented by the mermaid.

In 1er VTO (Premier voyage dans le temps de mes oeuvres), the vignettes represent Samba’s artistic journey, a pictorial diary of his life. It’s even called First Travel into the Time of My Works. The vignettes on the right depict scenes of education, while the works on the left represent family and status. Samba’s paintings are about hope, education and growth. He is one the pioneers of African art from the 1980s and continues to be an influential presence on a younger generation of artists.

Cinga Samson is another young and celebrated artist - born in 1986. He is from Cape Town, South Africa where the Norval Foundation is based. His work references photography through his use of traditional portrait poses.

The men in his paintings are a reflection of him, his family, and his community as a gay man in South Africa, aspiring towards wealth, belonging and status - as represented by the ornate fashion that the protagonists wear. A very important signature in Cinga Samson's work is the void of the eyes; it serves as a form of magical realism, which runs through his work.

There is an interesting interplay between the spiritual realm, the inner world - represented by the void and the luminosity in the eyes - together with the materialistic world that we live in - represented by the clothing.

In his work Inyongc 1, Samson depicts men giving food to women and serving them, which challenges gender roles and stereotypes still present in Africa. Samson’s paintings often include references to brands as a metaphor for aspiration and status, and also nods to the market of fake brands that are often sold in Africa.

We start with a pioneer of Modern Art - Mohamed Melehi (b. 1936 - d. 2020) well known for his graphic paintings, murals and sculptures. Melehi was born in Asilah, a small town next to Tangiers, where he founded a festival that became a huge cultural centre for artists, musicians and thinkers.

His abstract language is rich in symbolism and references. For instance, the wave patterns are drawn from nature and represent water in Africa; the flames represent dance, but also the symbol of the Palestinian revolution.

There are definite political undertones to Mohammed Melehi's work, and he reconciles abstraction, art for art's sake, together with a more coded language.

He sees art as a tool for revolution, to make people aware of ideas that can be rendered from artistic action.

Another important Moroccan artist is Leila Alaoui. She was born in 1982, France and died tragically at the age of 33. In 2016, while working on a Human Rights Campaign for Amnesty International, she was struck by gunfire in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso.

This body of work is The Moroccans, probably her most well known body of work. Some of these images were taken in rural areas of Morocco; others in the town square of Marrakech called Jemaa el-Fnaa which really captures one of the hearts of Moroccan culture with music, merchants and a very rich, contemporary folkloric tradition.

Joël Andrianomearisoa, (b. 1977) is a Malagasy artist, living between Paris and Madagascar. Joël’s work is very much about emotions. He says "all of my research is about the materiality of emotions."

Andrianomearisoa was the first artist to represent Madagascar in the Venice Biennale in 2019. He created this installation, I Have Forgotten the Night, where visitors walk through a maze of materials and textiles. His work is really about the edge of desires and affection. He wants people to get lost in patterns and density of textures.

The Harry David Art Collection houses approximately 400 works. Harry David is a Cypriot-Nigerian collector based between Lagos, Nigeria and Athens.

The first artist to mention is British-Nigerian artist, Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962, London). He is probably one of the most well known British artists and explores African art and legacies of colonialism. His signature style includes the use of Dutch wax cloth, which he found in Brixton market in the 1980s.
He wraps all of his sculptures or installations with this cloth that is often considered “traditionally African”, when in reality it is very inauthentic.
Here, he appropriates a well-known sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace, from the Louvre and transforms it into his own style.

In this installation, The British Library, which is actually on permanent display at the Tate, Shonibare wraps 6,328 books in his signature Dutch wax print, and the names of the books are printed on the spine.
The majority of the books are drawn from first or second generation immigrants in Britain, some are very well known figures such as Hans Holbein, Dame Helen Mirren and writers like Zadie Smith; some are immigration opponents, such as Nigel Farage.
He tackles these significant global postcolonial questions around mythologies, appropriation and globalisation.

Romuald Hazoumè (b. 1962, Benin) is an artist who uses ready materials found in Benin, mainly petrol containers. He weaves in Yoruba tradition and traditional mask-making to represent the characters and stereotypes that he has observed and then transposed their characteristics.

It is striking how expressive they are when in fact, they're made of petrol containers, an essential commodity to the economy in Benin.

The use of a petrol container is a social political commentary about Africa’s ingenuity and resilience. These poetic works are examples of how artists can communicate hugely charged messages with simple means.