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

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.

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.