Kenya's Sinking Venice Pavillion

At the 2013 Venice Biennale the world was  treated to the bizarre spectacle of Kenya (the country that gave the world Wangechi Mutu and Magdalene Odundo) being "prostituted" to China and Italy with a pavilion where artists from these countries greatly outnumbered Kenyan ones. As if this wasn't sufficient humiliation, despite the inevitable outpourings  of derision, critical outrage  and depositions to government ministries,  the same individuals  are set  to do a repeat performance this year. 

I think the piece of art work from the 2013 Biennale that summed up the  disgraceful 2013 enterprise most successfully  was the main instigator, Armando Tanzini's carved African woman. This piece (most likely not carved by him as he is in the habit of paying African artists to produce work for him under questionable ethical circumstances) seems to  hint at his relationship with Africa. The unfortunate woman lies prostrate on the floor with her well rounded "African bottom" raised invitingly for someone to take advantage of. 

The antics displayed through this pavilion inadvertently spotlighted the African realities of ruthless and irresistible foreign influence in pursuit of resources, exploitation, political, financial,moral and sexual corruption, collusion, impunity  and a failure to value ones own people/assets. 

In Venice this May it seems the world will be presented with the same unconscious exposé and meditation on negative aspects of Kenya and  it's continent. On the other hand - if action is taken it may it not be fanciful to imagine that viewers will be looking at an empty pavilion  with large signs stating " CLOSED BY PUBLIC DEMAND"?.

African Contemporary and Modern Art Auction 2pm, 26th March online via London's The Auction Room

MAÏMOUNA GUERRESI (B.1951, ITALY) ROKHAYA (FROM THE GIANTS SERIES) Lambda print

100 x 63 cm Executed in 2010,  Estimate: £4,000 - £6,000

Check out  latest auction with The Auction Room here . Works from all over the African continent and some from the Diaspora - from London to Trinidad. Prices range from £300 to just under £30,000.  

This sale presents a great opportunity to bid for highly sought after works by Maimouna Guerresi, Fabrice Monteiro, Goncarlo Mabunda, Pascale Mathine Tayou, Ablade Glover  and many others at  favourable prices.

Selected works  will be on view at Mallet, 37 Dover Street, London W1S 4NJ from 19th - 26th March 2015 10am - 5pm, Mon - Fri (weekends by appointment).

Mario Macilau: The Road Not Taken

The brilliant Mozambican photographer, Mario Macilau arrives in London next week for his first U.K. solo show, The Road Not Taken. This follows  his participation in The Saatchi Gallery’s first Pangaea: New Art from Africa and Latin America exhibition  last year. His new show contains a collection of powerful images from two major series The Price of Cement and Out of Town.

Most of Macilau’s work is concerned with representing the plight of marginalised people but what makes his images so powerful and so haunting is the absence of voyeurism and intrusion that is the back story of many photographs that are in the public domain. Here there is a palpable sense of trust between photographer and subject. Macilau’s explicit aim is to allow his models to tell their stories. The results may be harrowing but they invariably invoke a sense of shared humanity.

Mário Macilau | Untitled (5) | The Cement Series | C-Print | 80 x 120cm | Edition of 6 plus AP £2,000 courtesy of Ed Cross Fine Art Ltd and the Auction Room. .

His Price of Cement images portray workers in illegal cement bagging operations – working at night in lethal environmental conditions.


His Out of Town works focus on neglected communities – the image below is of a Maasai man taken in Kenya in 2014.

Mário Macilau | Untitled (1), Out of Town Series | 2014 | | C-Print | 80 x 120cm | Edition of 6 plus AP £2,000 courtesy of Ed Cross Fine Art Ltd and The Auction Room

Mario Macilau: The Road not Taken, 23rd March – 10th April, is at Mallet, 37 Dover Street,  W1S 4NJ

Ismaila Manga: myths, signs and symbols

Ismaila Manga is one of Senegal’s most interesting artists. He graduated from Senegal’s Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in 1982 and later spent thirteen years in Montreal where he attended Ecole international du design de Montréal before returning to Africa determined to rediscover his own continent. His work features in collections both public and private, in Senegal, Europe, the United States, Canada and South America.

Savanne | Pencil and mixed media on canvas | 142 x 245cm

“Every image fights with death, containing the memory of what has gone, starting with the ancestors,” explains Ismaila. “On the other hand any denial of death weakens the vitality of our mental life. Myths, signs and symbols allow me to establish what seems to me to be the essence of our humanity: the temporal.”

“I use the passing of days and nights to mark on canvas the imprint of time, letting the latter do its own work, materializing in rust obtained by the oxidation of metals. The photos I use in my work are just memories which I project on to the canvas, marked by time and drawn with a lead pencil, the simplest of materials that an artist can use.”

Click here to view our collection of Ismaila Manga pieces.

For enquiries about Ismaila Manga’s work please contact:

Ed Cross ed@edcrossfineart.com +44 (0) 7507067567

Nathalie Bikoro and the language of history

Nathalie Anguezomo Menier Mba Bikoro is a French-Gabonese interdisciplinary artist working with visual arts & live art performance.

With an education in Politics, Philosophy and Media Arts, Bikoro left France and the UK to return to Gabon to set out her work as an artist.

Leaving Mum II, 2011, 10.5 x 14.5cm

Part of exhibition "The Middle Passage, Alice in Wonderland" at Tiwani Contemporary, London, 2012

Her 10 year battle with leukaemia during childhood in Gabon, the Netherlands and France has influenced the narrative and methods in which she chooses to create her work. This personal struggle for recovery and return back to her family has pushed her visual language as well as setting goals to develop independent creative initiatives in the arts and culture lead by local people. Her aims and objectives are to incorporate converging arts and sciences into her own practice and research towards developing a Cancer Recovery Arts Centre. She aims to do this by incorporating creative spaces for interaction for children and adults in Libreville, Lambarene & Bitam (Gabon) and by developing educational collaborative community projects lead by local people.

Into The Looking Glass, 2011, Photo-etching; black ink on ivory paper, 9.3 x 10.5cm

Mba Bikoro uses the vocabulary of various art forms to make works that function to create fractured narratives and blurs boundaries between meaning, experience and aesthetics. Her alternative live art performances are unique interpretations of historical mythology and challenging appropriations of a knowledge far from ordinary. In doing so she highlights, accentuates and magnifies elements of the relationships present within these spaces.

Her practice proposes a composition of sound, body movement, archaeology and digital performance and encourages interactive response. Her approach responds to people and spaces mediating a great awareness of combining politics and philosophy.

Click here to view our collection of Nathalie Bikoro pieces.

For enquiries about Nathalie Bikoro’s work please contact:

Ed Cross ed@edcrossfineart.com +44 (0) 7507067567

Kimathi Donkor - a figurative master

Kimathi Donkor is a British artist living and working in London whose large, figurative oil paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the UK and internationally.

Oshun visits Gaba at Tate’s ‘Big House’ | Oil on Linen | 170 x 140cm | 2013

Hailing from a family with roots in Ghana, Jamaica, England, Zambia and Poland, Donkor’s meticulously crafted compositions draw on the traditions of portraiture and historical painting. Yet the themes of his work address dramatic modern subjects – ranging from urban conflict in contemporary London to the adventures of Ghana’s anti-colonial heroine, Yaa Asantewaa. Sitters are often friends or family, which, he believes, imparts a degree of intimacy to the monumentality of his figures.

Donkor is a master painter in a digital age, but his work is anything but anachronistic. It is steeped in historical, contemporary and art history references that inform, entertain and challenge the viewer. His paintings are both beautiful works of art and complex political/historical conundrums, arising out of his own heritage and at times challenging personal journey and his astute study of history and art history.

Notebook II | Watercolour and pencil on paper | 32 x 24cm | 2013

In 2012, Donkor was commissioned by Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) to produce new paintings for his acclaimed Queens of The Undead solo show at Rivington Place, London. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Derek Hill painting award for the British School at Rome, which included a three-month residency in Italy, studying the work of the Baroque master, Caravaggio.

In 2010, the artist's paintings were exhibited at the 29th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. His Caribbean Passion paintings are currently on long-term display at the Usher Gallery museum in Lincoln. From 2009 to 2011, Donkor collaborated with the artists Raksha Patel and Eleni Zagkali alongside a group of young Londoners to create artworks for the Seeing Through participatory project at Tate Britain.

Writing about the artist’s work has appeared in Frieze.com, Studio International, The Guardian and Visual Culture in Britain amongst many other journals.

Kimathi Donkor has been has been the recipient of two full-time painting bursaries from the Arts & Humanities Research Council. He gained his Master’s degree in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts (2010) and his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College (1987). He is currently completing a doctorate in painting at Chelsea College of Art and Design.

Click here to view our collection of Kimathi Donkor pieces.

For enquiries about Kimathi Donkor’s work please contact:

Ed Cross ed@edcrossfineart.com +44 (0) 7507067567

Ed Cross interview: African art and developments in the online market

Mamady Seydi | Les Cyclistes | 2012 | mixed media sculpture

Ed Cross was recently interviewed by Richard Mudariki for Omeka Magazine. He and Richard discussed Ed’s introduction to African art and his time spent in Africa as a sculptor. Ed shares his thoughts on the current state of the market and how selling African art online is growing in popularity and profitability.

Read the full article:
http://issuu.com/richardmudariki/docs/85/1?e=8722852%2F5808048

The tipping point for contemporary African art?

Mário Macilau | Photo of Girl with Doll

Ed Cross was recently interviewed by Rachel Hamada for This is Africa about the contemporary African art market and art scene. Ed believes that the market has reached a tipping point, and that it is now getting the attention it deserves.

What does this increasing interest in contemporary African art mean for the artists involved? Is the term ‘African’ being painted with too broad a brush? Ed offers his opinions into these issues in this insightful article.

Read the article: http://www.thisisafrica.me/visual-arts/detail/20070/the-quiet-explosion-of-contemporary-african-art-in-the-global-art-market

Joseph Bertiers and "The True Lier"

The True Lier  | Joseph Bertiers | 2013 | Oil on canvas | 90 x 100cm 

When I  first visited Joseph Bertiers in Nairobi we had met by the main Dagoretti  road and drove together towards his house – I had no idea what to expect and was greeted by a walled compound with a large smart looking gate – we paused outside  as Bertiers gestured to what look like an “askari” (a guard) just visible inside.  The guard  turned out to be one of Bertiers’ many life-sized scrap metal sculptures that adorn his garden. This was the first of many jokes. Even his name is a joke. He renamed himself Bertiers from the original Mbatia to see if having a European name would  boost his art sales – it did apparently – though that was in another era. Perhaps he should change it back?  But that wouldn’t be funny – so he wont.

The painting you see here is a rollocking expose of a type of corrupt and venal pastor that plagues the African continent and many other parts of the globe. This painting was inspired by revelations about the Fire Gospel Ministry in Kenya where a pastor had been caught paying women to fake illness so that they could be miraculously cured. Bertiers depicts the realities of sexual harassment and the sheer lies and  hypocrisy peddled by these “true liers”.

In the words of the artist:

The time has come for people to realize that they are

conned, cheated and given no spiritual healing at all.  Although they take their  time, these people who pretend to be spiritually superior to their congregations enrich themselves through the poor exploiting the fact that  religion is the opium of the people,  as Karl Marx the philosopher said.

Bertiers is an increasingly successful and acclaimed artist. His work was recently featured in the Financial Times and his work  is in several major collections in Europe and the U.S.A..

Mário Macilau and the Price of Cement

The Price of Cement is a series of photographs by the young and acclaimed Mozambican photographer Mário Macilau. The works  show the tragic reality of  young boys and girls who work in illegal cement bagging operations in Mozambique in darkened buildings, hidden from view, recycling/cutting cement from cement spillages with disastrous consequences for their health. The images that ironically and intuitively reference the world of mime and fashion speak devastatingly for  themselves. The empowerment of his subjects to tell their stories with dignity is central to Macilau’s important work. 

                                                                Untitled (The Price of Cement) 5 C-Print 2013 Editions of 6 

Mário Macilau

B.1984 in  Maputo, Mozambique  where he lives and works 

Mário Macilau was born in the newly independent Mozambique, in the midst of the most critical phase of its civil war. His family struggled financially and moved from the Inhambane province to the capital, Maputo, in search of a better life. When he was 10 years old he began to work in a small market frequented by the middle / upper class where he became a street child, washing cars in the car park and helping to carry the groceries in an effort to support his family.

Macilau started his journey as photographer in 2003 and went  professional  when he traded his mother’s cell phone for his first camera in 2007, he specializes in long-term projects that focus on living and environmental conditions. As a documentary photographer he is committed to initiating positive change across different cultures, locations and perspectives, in his home country he uses his work to confront the reality  of power, environment and cultural heritage that affect  socially isolated groups and issues that define our times.

Macilau  shows his work regularly in national and international exhibitions  and recently he has been included at the Pan African group exhibition during the Biennale of African Photography in Bamako 2011 where he won the Crossing Point residency  in France at Les Rencontres D'arles in 2012 from Fondation Blachère. He was a finalist for the  7th edition of BESphoto 2011 in Portugal where his work has been shown at CCB - Centro Cultural de Belém. In Brazil he has exhibited at Pinacoteca de Estado de Sao Paulo. In 2011, he exhibited at VI Chobi Mela Photo Festival in Bangladesh 2011, the Photo Spring in Beijing, China 2011, Lagos Photo I and II in Nigeria, The KLM in Malasya among others. 

Macilau has won many national and international  awards including  the Young ACP Photographer’s Competition in 2010, the Visa Pour La Creation 2012 from the French Institute, The first prize from the Protection Project in Washington DC 2012, the EVTZ Foundation prize in Germany, the Santa Lucia Award in Spain 2011, the AECID Award for creation in 2011, he won the talent prize from France Embassy in Maputo in 2011, the TDM Bienal in Maputo ... Mário Macilau regularly attends the Annual Photography Master Class  in Africa organized by Goethe Institute, Johannesburg.

Mário Macilau was recently featured on Al Jazeera’s Artscape programme in May 2013 

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/artscape/2013/04/2013422111558769256.html

For enquiries about Mario Macilau’s work please contact: 

Ed Cross ed@edcrossfineart.com +44 (0) 7507067567

Cyrus Kabiru - visionary artist

Cyrus Kabiru | C-Stunner series - Identity |

Cyrus Kabiru is one of the most exciting artists to emerge from the burgeoning Nairobi art scene. His recycled materials "C-Stunner" works are witty, humorous, profound but unpretentious. And I am not alone in admiring his work - interest from all over the world has been unprecedented and is growing.

Here is small piece I wrote on my new blog Ed Cross Fine Art

and here is just one of many articles about him, this one from the interesting Makeshift site.

Kabiru had a show in Holland last year at Kuntspodium T Gallery in Tilburg and we are planning exhibitions in the U.K. ,U.S.A and elsewhere.

Enquiries to ed@edcrossfineart.com

Soly Cissé

Soly, as many of you will know, is one of Senegal's most successful and prolific artists - he paints with gusto - and I believe some of his work is truly inspired. It has that sense of the mystical and there is a vigour about the work and the man that is exciting.

Here are some very strong works from a series that he has only just produced - they are all 80 x 80cm acrylic and pastel on canvas.

email me quickly if you are interested by them as his work is in demand.

ed@edcrossfineart.com

http://edcrossfineart.com/cisse.html

Life Imitating Art: Michael Soi, the ICC and the "Ocampo Six"

Michael Soi | Hague Express No 5.| 77cm by 65 cm| 2011
Since April 2008 , Nairobi artist, Michael Soi, has been producing a series of paintings entitled Hague Express celebrating the hoped for departure from Kenya of those (to be) indicted by the ICC over their role in the 2007/8 post election violence which claimed 1220 lives, uprooted whole communities and lead Kenya to the brink of civil war. Today (April 5th 2011) Kenya witnessed the fulfillment of Soi's prophetic vision as some of the accused flew out of Nairobi on a KLM flight to Holland - all six accused will soon be at the International Criminal Court. In a poll from the Kenya's Daily Nation published today 61% of those polled approved of these prominent men being hauled out of the country to face justice in Europe. Real justice at home would be better but this development is viewed as a massive step in the battle against what is now viewed by many as the the biggest evil of them all - impunity.
Michael Soi | City in The Sun | 122 x 183cm | 2011
Michael Soi's wish for justice is shared by almost all Kenyans, and he was not alone in producing politically charged work in the early part of 2008 whilst his country teetered on the brink and his countrymen were slaughtered by incentivised mobs. But he was possibly unique in painting his vision of a desirable outcome and faithfully continuing this until - almost miraculously - Messrs Ruto, Kenyatta et al, were forced to head to the Hague (with expensive government lawyers in tow) this week. Soi is understandably proud and pleased that Sr Ocampo himself is the owner of painting No 4 in the series.

Soi is something of an amiable giant -ruled by an irrepressible sense of humour and a satirical but benevolent view of life. He is all artist and no politician - but he like many other Kenyan artists are profoundly concerned about standing up against injustice.

The visual arts in Kenya are still a minority interest - there is no National Gallery, the National Museum leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to contemporary art - but artist groups like Kuona Trust , where Soi has his studio, have flourished and little by little contemporary artists are leaving their mark on the national consciousness through exposure via newspaper reviews probably more than anything else. Kenya's cartoonists - Gado being the most famous - have for years flown the flag of cheeky defiance - even during the dark days of the Moi regime. Soy who is an artist - not a cartoonist - is nevertheless an inheritor of that brave and humorous tradition. His work is Hogarthian in its rollicking satirical portrayal of everyday hypocrisy and farce. His characters engage you in a way that is uniquely Kenyan. And he has developed an economical and powerful visual language that will ensure him an important place in the country's art history. They used to say that all the important art came from West Africa - well that was not true then and it certainly isn't now.





Works from a new series about working women by Michael Soi

For further information about works by Michael Soi contact me by email ed@edcrossfineart.com

Ed Cross 4th April 2011

Sekano's Women

Charles Sekano Princessly Mixed Media on Paper 76 x 50cm

Charles Sekano Looking Back Mixed Media on Paper 76 x 50cm

Given the scarcity of art schools across much of the African continent it is not surprising that many of this continent's finest artists are "self taught", but whilst many artists like Richard Onyango and Jak Katarikawe are musicians (Eduard Saidi Tingatinga from Tanzania started out as a Makonde dancer) it is relatively rare to find a man who invented himself as both painter, poet and pianist. Such a man is the South African (former exile) artist - Charles Sekano. Thirty years of his life was spent in Kenya (from the 60s – 90s) escaping the poison of apartheid. His bold and passionate use of colour - a one man crusade against any kind of colour bar.

An uneasy relationship with publicity, which as his gallerist I have just frustratingly experienced at first hand, has contributed to his being more of an artist's artist, though he is a legend to many with a serious interest in East African art. He has unapologetically existed in the shadows, like so many of the subjects of his paintings. There is frequently a romantic longing within artists for their work to remain purely personal unsullied by the often crass categorisation of the public. I know this from my own work as an artist. Sekano has achieved fame – his work is to be found in New York as well as Nairobi, and in important museum collections in the States but now approaching seventy he remains the rebel – always at his happiest playing his piano in a darkened nightclub.

One of the visitors to my current show of Sekano's work commented "you can tell the works were done for himself alone" and it's true there is no sense of anything else but the artist and his immortalised subject - often a beautiful young woman in the unforgiving urban African night. Sekano's women are not sentimentalised or even romanticised they portray a stubborn range of human emotion from nostalgia to sulkiness, to maternal instinct to narcissism to pride, ambivalence, coyness and sadness - all depicted with cryptic precision.

View a catalogue of the exhibition

Peterson Kamwathi

Peterson Kamwathi Untitled Digital Print 650mm x 480mm

This remarkable print by the Kenyan artist, Peterson Kamwathi whom I work with in London, was born of a collaboration with the Kenyan poet Shailja Patel for the South African based project Dialogue Among Civilizations The Art of Human Rights you can read Shailja's poem What we want on this link.

I think Kamwathi's print makes its point with economy and subtlety, demonstrating the strength, beauty and vulnerability of human communities.



There is a very illuminating London article/interview with Kamwathi by Karen Dabrowska which gives a real sense of both the man and his work.

Peterson Kamwathi explaining Kenya through woodcut prints and icons

and we produced a full catalogue of the artist's last show in London with an essay by the SOAS art historian, Elsbeth Court, and an interview with fellow artist Sam Hopkins together with images and details of all the works in the show. Do check it out...

...Matter of Record... Catalogue

Charles Sekano - House of Women

February 10^th –March 31^st 2011 Talbot Rd, London

Charles Sekano in the 1980s

Born in Sophiatown, Johannesburg in 1945, Sekano’s youth was cruelly overshadowed by the consequences of apartheid. Sophiatown was destroyed by the authorities and his family forced in to tribally segregated districts within Soweto. This process of dislocation lead to the early death of his father and to his decision to flee South Africa and exile himself from the harsh and violent conditions that he found himself in.

It was in Nairobi in the 1960’s, amid the very real isolation of exile that Sekano forged himself in to both self taught artist and musician – and where he worked as a Jazz pianist in the multiracial, bars and nightclubs of this rough edged African metropolis. Here he lived life in the tradition of a romantic bohemian artist and musician, developing his own version of the three Rs – “the three Ps” – Painting, Poetry and Piano. Like Degas and Toulouse Lautrec before him – living amongst his, mostly female, subjects.

His artistic expression was and is informed by the sense of loss experienced after his family were uprooted and by the resultant severing of family bonds. Women, for Sekano, - those that he immortalises in his works - became his world and his artistic language.

In the words of Sekano in an interview from the 1980s:

“The whole idea is a symbolic relationship. Even the theme “Woman” seems to be remembering my mother, my sisters. I’m trying to live on a higher level with them because I have no communication to show that I am attached to them. They are inseparable from me. There is no border. This Woman theme is my landscape. The only piece of property I own. Woman is the only country I have.”

During his years of exile in Nairobi Sekano waged his own passionate war against the apartheid regime with paintbrush and crayon. The fact that he chose to include Caucasian women in his work was a starting point that surprised some of his peers. But for him colour itself began to symbolise freedom.

“I decided to destroy the apartheid in my thoughts by using colour, by breaking the colour bar. So I just fused everything. I made a red woman, I made a blue woman, a green woman.”

Whilst influences of Picasso and Braque’s Cubism , Toulouse-Lautrec’s and Henri Rousseau’s poster art are clear in his work, Sekano has always rooted himself in the realities of cosmopolitan urban Africa and drawn on Egyptian and San Rock art for inspiration. The nightclubs and bars of Kenya with their beautiful female clientele from diverse cultures across Africa were his subject matter and remain his inspiration. These are “spaces” where opportunism and desire intersect and coexist, often in surprising ways. Each work – be it of a single figure, a couple or a group, contains a narrative – keenly and economically observed. The story of the lure of the bright lights and the promise of escape from poverty and pain underlies many of the tableaux. Sekano is never moralistic, always humanistic – his works celebrate and preserve moments.

In 1997 Charles Sekano returned to a newly liberated South Africa with mixed feelings leaving behind a country he had grown to love, and re-entering a society that had largely forgotten him – the fate of many a returning exile.

Apart from two fine works from the late 1980s the paintings in this exhibition have been produced in the last two years and are part of a new body of work which the artist calls “House of Women”. Sekano has become fascinated with a “building block” mosaic style – where the women who have inspired him all his life are constructed from these geometric shapes referencing the notion of home and strength as well as musical notes.

Charles Sekano has exhibited widely in Kenya, Holland and Germany, Japan and the U.S.A., his most recent show was at the University of Pretoria in 2008. His works are in private collections across the world and in various museums including Volkekunde Museum, Frankfurt, and the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts.

The works in this exhibition are for sale – for further information please contact Ed Cross at Ed Cross Fine Art ed@edcrossfineart.com or visit http://edcrossfineart.com/ for the complete catalogue and pricelist.

Ed Cross Fine Art thanks Simon Russell for his generous support for this exhibition.

Witness: the Spectre of Memory in Contemporary African Art

Aminatta Forna with curator Ed Cross at WITNESS: the spectre of memory in contemporary African art, in the background a painting by Zimbabwe's Lovemore Kambudzi

What the critics say!

"If you are in Edinburgh go to this show. 23 Atholl Crescent - 5 mins walk from the Book Festival site. It's brilliant".

Aminatta Forna

Author of The Memory of Love, The Devil that Danced on the Water and other titles

"Africa's economy is fast moving out of the doldrums, and a new breed of wealthy would-be art patron is looking around at the bargains on offer.
Bonhams and Philips now have auctions with an Africa theme, and are a good place to start. But if you want friendly expert advice, try Edinburgh, where Ed Cross's Festival exhibition has some magnificent examples of art worth buying...to enjoy, or as an investment, or both.

If you can persuade him to part with a 'not for sale' work by Lovemore Kambudzi you won't regret it, for this is sure to become an African classic.

True, prices seem high for relatively unknown artists - and I reckon it would take 15-20,000 before Ed and the owner might change their mind about a work that dominates the exhibition If they won't budge, buy up the remaining Donkey pieces, (by Peterson Kamwathi) with their sharp social comment and bitter humour.

Price? About £1500 each. In a couple of years they will be seen as a steal."

Michael Holman
Africa editor of the Financial Times 1984-2002
Author of the Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies

Brushes with Memory

Curating an exhibition in a place away from your regular abode is an experience I am familiar with but one that never fails to excite me. In many ways it is the perfect way to experience a place as you encounter both local people and other visitors in the space that you have staked out.

Witness: the spectre of memory in contemporary African art is my current exhibition here staged by Ed Cross Fine Art Ltd in the beautiful city of Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. The show is at the English Speaking Union’s pleasant little gallery at 23 Atholl Crescent – in a lovely 18^th century part of the city not far from Princes St. It features five artists – from four African countries: Soly Cisse from Senegal, Lovemore Kambudzi from Zimbabwe, Peterson Kamwathi from Kenya, Richard Onyango also from Kenya, and Dominique Zinkpe from The Republic of Benin. These are all artists I have dealings with – I have selected them because I love their work.

In this large and highly ambitious reduction Woodcut queuing figures from the abortive 2008 Kenyan elections can be made out amid a mass of ballot boxes.

Memory is the theme of the exhibition – its presence is felt in all acts of creation – but I am interested by the specific roles it plays with the five artists represented and here I will write about three of them. Both Peterson Kamwathi and Lovemore Kambudzi have consciously or otherwise assumed the role of guardians of memories for their respective countries Kenya and Zimbabwe. Kamwathi with his thoughtful, beautifully executed and focussed work. Each marking aspirations, disappointments and travesties of justice. His work grounded in his country but expanding out in to the wider world and referring back to the past almost as if he is painstakingly assembling a language with which to explain what it is to be a human or indeed an animal,

in this world of ours which worships at the alter of systems of leverage that deliver power and or wealth to the few usually at the expense of the many. Where corporate, individual or national greed are ever present and the sins of many a father apparent if one looks deep enough. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance – there is vigilance in Kamwathi’s work that would be dogged if it were not beautiful. Existing behind the unflinching record of human failings is a strong belief in the soul, a kernel within humanity in Africa or anywhere on earth, that must be protected, nourished and celebrated.

Lovemore Kambudzi from Harare works from memory and his own sketches – he paints what he sees going on around him – the good, the bad and the ugly, in most cases applying one colour at a time across often large canvasses. In 2008 during one of the lowest points in Zimbabwe’s recent history when water supplies failed, Cholera stalked the country and political oppression was particularly brutal, I suggested that he and his family come to Kenya to take shelter for a while – a few days later the message came from his wife – “Lovemore wouldn’t know what to paint in Kenya – there are some extraordinary things going on– he can’t leave now - he has to keep painting what’s happening”. Kambudzi has only one subject – the living breathing stumbling, tragic but often smiling, Zimbabwe. It’s a circus that he cannot miss – he must not only witness but record – and his recording is detailed and intense - the expressions on the numerous characters that pepper his works are very specific and acutely observed - even the extras in his “cast of thousands” works are individuals, often betraying their emotions through a hunch of the shoulders or the tilt of a hip.

No one would describe Richard Onyango as a political artist, yet whilst his subject matter – mostly his own life both real and imagined, is completely at odds with that of Kamwathi and Kambudzi; his work too, is profoundly informed by politics and social phenomenon. Like Kamwathi, Onyango is driven by a vision of a just Africa. Where people are able to play their part in society and live in dignity. In Onyango’s case it is an extravagant, unfettered Utopian vision. It is a world where very overweight women of all colour (and presumably men too?) can defy gravity and pole-vault majestically through the air or belt round athletics tracks in record time.

It is a place where people are accorded proper respect regardless of their colour or body type – where women are as powerful as men and more than capable of defending themselves if needs be#

(note the pistol on his late girlfriend Drosie’s belt and the sword on his new fantasy lover, Deborah Teighler once dubbed “the fattest woman in America”). It is an anti-obsolescence world where machinery, engineering and vehicles are revered and well maintained in to old age. It is also a place where people are aware that “dreaming” is a creative process – for Onyango believes that people get what they look for in life. You could say the artist is living proof of his belief in the power of the mind as it was his decision as a child to remember everything he saw (in the absence of a camera) that he attributes to his “photographic memory” and the ability to recall childhood scenes with a high degree of accuracy. Others might attribute it to a variety of autism (is this merely a neurotic and tedious need for labels?) but his clear recollection of his own decision to “record what he was interested in” is compelling.

Have a look at the catalogue of the exhibition...

http://www.edcrossfineart.com/ECFA_Catalogue_and_price_list_Witness_the_Spectre_of_Memory.pdf

Contemporary African art in St Louis Senegal

Anyone heading for Dak'Art 2010 in Dakar , Senegal are warmly invited to come to St Louis to see the show I am putting on there - this is part of the Dak Art Off programme and the St Louis 250 celebrations - it also coincides with The St Louis Jazz Festival which is a jazz festival to die for http://www.saintlouisjazz.com/

Le nord, le sud, l'est et l'ouest
COMPTOIRS DU FLEUVE, ST LOUIS, SENEGAL May 12th-30th 2010
This exhibition brings together works from seven important artists from
Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania

Fathi Hassan – Egypt, Peterson Waweru Kamwathi – Kenya
Jems Robert Koko Bi – Cote D’Ivoire, The Late George Lilanga – Tanzania ,
Richard Onyango – Kenya , Charles Sekano – South Africa/Kenya,
Dominique Zinkpe – Benin

Charles Sekano - Two women – House of Women series – pastels on paper – 2009

This exhibition highlights the rich eclecticism inherent in the African continent and its art. It shows works from artists from seven countries (two of whom live in Europe) across different generations and educational backgrounds with works by the late master – George Lilanga di Nyama from Tanzania.


Fathi Hassan
Fathi Hassan (born 1957) is a Sudanese-Egyptian artist known for his installations involving the written word.
Of Nubian origin, Hassan took his diploma at the Naples Art School in 1984; in 1988 he was selected to represent Africa in the "Aperto '88" section of the Venice Biennale. He has exhibited in numerous galleries in Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, and New York City. Hassan has lived in Italy since 1979, working between Fano and Milan.
Hassan's work often emphasizes power relations and the relationship between the oral and written word; drawing upon his Nubian heritage, he places particular emphasis on the loss of language under the dominance of empire. Most of his scripts are based upon kufic calligraphy, but remain deliberately illegible and impossible to decipher.

Peterson Waweru Kamwathi
Peterson Kamwathi, born in Nairobi in 1980, is one of Kenya’s best regarded young artists and is now establishing himself as a major name in contemporary African art. His work combines subtle conceptual elements and rich content with technical mastery. His main body of work has been in printmaking where he is an acknowledged master of the woodcut process though more recently he has broadened his oeuvre to create several series of charcoal and mixed media works culminating in his “Sitting Allowance” installation which is almost epic in its scale documenting the grim realities of the bungled Kenyan 2007/8 elections
Kamwathi is participating in the 2010 Dak’art Biennale, he has been shown widely in Nairobi at the Rahimtulla Museum of Modern Art, and the Goethe Institute, Nairobi. He is currently in a residency at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam and will take part in the Museum Africa exhibition - Currencies in Contemporary African Art, Johannesburg in May 2010.

Jems Robert Koko Bi
Jems Robert Koko Bi was born in Cote D’Ivoire in 1966 where he lived and studied until 1997 when he won the DAAD scholarship and commenced his art studies in Germany culminating in his position as master student with Professor Klaus Rinke in 2000.
Koko Bi is principally a sculptor using wood as his medium though it is his extraordinary drawings that are featured in this exhibition. His work is informed by the duality of his own life. He refers to this as a tension between time and space – time represented by the history of his country and continent and the space that he now finds himself occupying as an international contemporary artist – but with Africa and its history following him like a shadow. Koko Bi has been a frequent participant and prize winner at the Dak’Art Biennale.


The Late George Lilanga
George Lilanga (1932-2005 was Tanzanian of Makonde origins began his training as a sculptor in 1961 in Dar-es-Salaam; in 1973 he became associated with the newly founded Nyumba ya Sanaa (House of Arts),.
His playful figures are best understood as heirs to the Makonde shetani, the unruly spirits of Makonde cosmology. Similarly, the complexity of his paintings can be compared to the Makonde ujamaa (tree of life), which signifies unity and solidarity. At the same time, the vibrant inventiveness of Lilanga’s work also testifies to the profound revolution that marked the birth of individualization and personal talent in Africa.

Richard Onyango
Born in Kenya in 1960, Onyango’s work has featured in three major international African exhibitions Africa Now, Africa Remix and Seven Stories about African Art . Onyango’s work hovers between memory and fantasy. Gifted with near perfect recall he is able to remember and reproduce scenes from his childhood and later life in extraordinary detail.
Charles Sekano
Sekano, who is a South African citizen, spent the decades from the 1960s to the 1980s living and working as an artist and Jazz musician in his country of exile, Kenya. An unashamed colourist and admirer of women, he was represented by Ruth Schaffner’s Gallery Watatu until her death. He returned to South Africa after the end of apartheid and sank in to obscurity until his show at the University of Pretoria in 2008. Sekano lives by what he calls “The Three Ps” – Painting, Poetry and Piano.

Dominique Zinkpe
Dominique Zinkpè was born in 1969 in Cotonou in the Republic of Benin. He has participated in numerous exhibitions workshops and residences in Africa, Europe and South America. Zinkpe’s oeuvre is complex and wide ranging, spanning installations, drawings, painting, sculpture and video. There is a restlessness within Zinkpe that prevents him from confining his creative processes to one medium, but his paintings and drawings represent his most intimate work.

Curator: Ed Cross
Ed Cross is an artist, art dealer and curator specialising in contemporary African art. Ed has a Degree in Art History from Cambridge University and now lives and works in London after spending more than twenty years in East Africa working in publishing and the visual arts. His company Ed Cross Fine Art Ltd (www.edcrossfineart.com) promotes and sells a number of the continent’s most important artists.