PARIS.- On 11 May 2022 , PIASA will present an exceptional sale in Paris dedicated to Africa and its related scenes.

Among the lots presented is to be highlighted a major work by Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Man’s Journey on Earth, from 1983. This powerful drawing is the earliest and most important work by the artist ever presented at auction, right as the Ivorian master is being honored in an exceptional monographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One work similar to the one presented here and produced just four days prior, in September 1983, is presented in the MoMA exhibition.

The sale will also be an occasion to further explore the various scenes linked to the continent, with this time a focus on the Portuguese and Spanish-speaking countries of Africa, Brazil and Cuba. Wilson Tiberio, one of the first and most important black painters in Brazil, wholly invested in the subject of emancipation struggles accross the black world, moved to Paris in the mid-1940s, and later travelled to Africa, including Dakar, where he met Léopold Sédar Senghor. Two major works by this artist, dated 1944 and coming from a private Brazilian collection where they were kept since the 1940s, will be offered for the first time on the secondary market. They will be accompanied by works by the Cuban master Manuel Mendive, but also by a younger generation led by artists such as Kiluanji Kia Henda from Angola.

However, African artists do not only shine on their own continent, in North and South America and in Europe: a major work by the artist N’Guessan Kra, Mémoire du Temps, exhibited from 1995 in several museums in Japan, from Tokyo to Gifu, will demonstrate the interest of Asia for the most avant-garde artists of the continent as early as the end of the 1980s. Invited to participate in the contemporary art exhibition held during the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988, N’Guessan Kra is represented in the collection of the very important MMCA National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (Korea).

In addition to the above, the sale will introduce for the first time in an auction dedicated to African scenes, the work of two artists known for their commitment to social issues and the radical nature of their practice: Mohamed Bourouissa, represented with Temps Mort #41, a 2008 photograph from the eponymous video on the French prison system. The original video is part of major private and institutional collections, including the Pinault Collection in Paris and Venice; as well as Alfredo Jaar, whose touching video Embrace deals with the difficult theme of the Rwandan genocide, with dignity and sobriety.

From Wallen Mapondera to Lawrence Lemaoana, via Abe Obedina and the much soughtafter Marcellina Akpojotor, the young rising stars of the continent’s art scene are not left out. A contemporary section bustling with energy is dedicated to them, under the benevolent gaze of the Masters, including William Kentridge, present here with a preparatory drawing for his important opera the Magic Flute, Bocar Pathé Diong, master of the Dakar school, with a historic work from 1974, and Samuel Fosso, to whom a highly acclaimed exhibition was recently organized at the European Museum of Photography in Paris.