African Avant-Garde: Aboudia and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré
May 8 - June 26, 2021
Aboudia, Les Yeux Pop, 2017. Mixed media on canvas, 40 x 60 in. Courtesy of Ethan Cohen Gallery.
Ethan Cohen presents African Avant-Garde: Aboudia & Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, a juxtaposition of two top African artists. Both Aboudia and Bouabré hail from the Ivory Coast; separated by six decades of cultural history, together they constitute that country’s most significant and innovative artists of the post-colonial era. While they come from different generational and educational backgrounds, they share a common vision—that of Africa’s and Ivory Coast’s global embrace. Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, born in 1923, underwent formal training by the colonial government, while Aboudia, born in 1983, grew up on the streets as a graffiti artist. Yet both evidence a strong personal sense of the universal artistic currents that run through the world.
Bouabré’s consciousness emerged during the first opening of Africa onto the world stage as a post-colonial independent series of countries. As such his work centers on imagery that explicitly places recognizably African themes and figures in tandem with those of other continents. His message is both one of global diversity and unity. Philosopher, visual poet, and artist, he iterates universal truths that bind humanity. He early inhabited a time (as embodied by the 1955 Bandung Conference of non-aligned Asian and African states) when it seemed possible for emerging countries to create an alternate global awakening.
Aboudia arrived at the same sense of a global platform many decades later, just when the world re-embraced its commonality at a post-Cold War moment of digital media convergence.
As an artist who grew up on the street, expressing his vision initially through the freedom of graffiti, he matured his culturally site-specific imagery into what is now instantly recognizable across continents for its power and immediacy. He is the inheritor of the mantle of Jean-Michel Basquiat and arguably Africa’s most celebrated young artist.
Aboudia’s renown has grown in the art world over the past seven years. In 2019, he was honored in the Ivory Coast by receiving an award as a contributor to culture. He has been recognized globally, shown in the Saatchi Gallery two years in a row as part of the exhibitions Pangea I and Pangea II (2013/2014), collected by François Pinault (one of the most significant collectors), the King of Morocco, and many other distinguished collections. Most recently, in March 2021, Aboudia had a solo exhibition at Christie’s New York, and was the first artist to have a solo online auction at the auction house.
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré was recognized by Okwui Enwezor, one of the most important curators of the past 50 years, and was included in the documenta in 2002, and in the landmark 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the George Pompidou Center. His work was featured both in the Ivory Coast Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, and in the main exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Massimiliano Gioni (2013). Though Bouabré is famous in the art world and his work is acknowledged as historically seminal, he remains under-recognized in the wider popular culture for his contributions.
By bringing these artists’ work together, we are paying homage to two African masters of world stature. Hitherto, Africa has been vastly overlooked as a force on the international art scene. Finally, it is gaining its place in the global dialogue, and these two artists are in the forefront of that achievement.
Artist Biographies
FRÉDÉRIC BRULY BOUABRÉ
Born 1923, Zépréguhé, Ivory Coast
Deceased 2014, Abidjan, Ivory Coast
Bouabré was among the first Ivorians to be formally educated by the French colonial government. In 1948 he had a vision he described as “the heavens opened up before my eyes and seven colorful suns described a circle of beauty around their Mother-Sun, I became Cheik Nadro: ‘He who does not forget.’" This vision directly influenced much of his later work. He created hundreds of drawings on cardstock while working as a clerk in various government offices, and these drawings as a whole comprise a project titled World Knowledge—an encyclopedia of universal knowledge and experience. Bouabré also created a 448-letter, universal Bété syllabary, which he used to transcribe the oral tradition of his people, the Bétés. This visual language is recorded through a set of approximately 1,000 small cards, each bearing monosyllabic pictograms, symbolic imagery, and text, with Bouabré’s commentary on life and history.
His work was featured in the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette in Paris. He was invited to participate in the Documenta 11 (2002), curated by Okwui Enwezor, with his work ‘Alphabete Bété (1991/92), that comprises the alphabet that Bouabré invented for the Bété language. His work was featured both in the Ivory Coast Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, and in the main exhibition “The Encylopedic Palace,” curated by Massimiliano Gioni (2013) and at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University during his solo exhibition “Alphabété: The World Through the Eyes of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré” (2019).
In 2014, Bouabré passed away at the age of 91 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
ABOUDIA
Born in 1983, Abidjan, Ivory Coast
In energetically painted canvases, inspired by graffiti and tribal art, Abdoulaye Diarrassouba a.k.a Aboudia (b. 1983) depicts vibrant landscapes and street scenes populated by child-like figures. Aboudia portrays urban African street culture with complex acrylic paintings that feature the faces of street children intermixed with echoes of tribal masks as part of his symbolic language. He draws on the images that defined his early life growing up in poverty on the streets of Abidjan – street art, traditional tribal art, the daily civil-war violence of 2011 that swept through Abidjan – and reimagines and condenses them into vivid, sketch-like, paintings.
Aboudia’s trademark “Nouchi” style is drawn from the street culture of children in his home city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The word “Nouchi” refers to their street patois which, combined with the ubiquitous graffiti around Abidjan, inspires Aboudia’s work – a form of dreamscape in response to privation. Rendered in oil sticks, acrylics, collage, and spray paint, his works are noted for powerful lines of color that evanesce electrically.
His mural-like canvases make the artist’s statement monumental yet sensitive, incorporating collage, wordplay, and flashes of street life in a deliberate evocation of children’s encounter with the world surrounding them. This style situates Aboudia uniquely in Abidjan, while a range of global influences is articulated in paint and collage. His incomparable expression of lost innocence and enduring childhood dreams exemplifies currents in African contemporary art and its increasing international relevance.
About the Curator:
Ethan Cohen is a distinguished NYC gallerist, art advisor, and curator with over 35 years of experience. Ethan Cohen Gallery has represented a pioneering blend of both emerging and internationally renowned artists. Mr. Cohen has steered the gallery to occupy a distinct place in contemporary art as a center of innovation across disciplines and countries. Today Ethan Cohen Gallery has two gallery locations, one in Chelsea in the heart of New York City, and the other in Beacon, New York.
Ethan Cohen first founded his gallery in 1987 as Art Waves/Ethan Cohen in SoHo, New York. A groundbreaker in the field of contemporary Chinese art, Ethan Cohen was the first gallerist to present the Chinese Avant-Garde of the 1980s to the United States, such as Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and others. Ethan Cohen Gallery today represents a diverse global mix of contemporary and post-war contemporary art, with a focus on Chinese and African Contemporary Art. Mr. Cohen is the first gallerist to represent Aboudia in the United States.