Artistic landscape for best African painters

Today we take on the African continent, scoping its artistic landscape for the best African painters you need to know. The contemporary era seems to run parallel with post-colonialism.

As a result, a highly interesting socio-political climate arose for contemporary African art to prosper. African artists have taken the responsibility to define, write or paint their history and identity.

So, without further ado, let’s discover the best African painters today.

EL ANATSUI is a Ghanaian sculptor who has spent much of his achievement-packed career living and working in Nigeria. El Anatsui currently runs a very robust studio practice, situated in Nsukka, Enugu, Nigeria, and Tema, Ghana, where some of the most beautiful and touching works of art in the world today are created.

He is one of the most highly acclaimed artists in African History and foremost contemporary artists in the world.

El Anatsui uses resources typically discarded such as liquor bottle caps, cassava graters and newspaper printing plates to create sculpture that defies categorisation.

His use of these materials reflects his interest in reuse, transformation, and an intrinsic desire to connect to his continent while transcending the limitations of place. His work can interrogate the history of colonialism and draw connections between consumption, waste, and the environment, but at the core is his unique formal language that distinguishes his practice.

Anatsui is well-known for large scale sculptures composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of aluminium bottle caps sourced from local alcohol recycling stations and bound together with copper wire. These intricate works, which can grow to be massive in scale, are luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated yet malleable. He leaves the installations open and encourages the works to take new forms every time they are installed.

El Anatsui’s works can be found amongst some of the most prestigious art collections in the world including permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; The British Museum; the Vatican Museum and many more. In 2023 he was awarded the highly reputable Hyundai Commission by Tate Modern.

El Anatsui was born in 1944 in Anyako, Ghana, a citizen of the Ewe Nation and son of a master weaver of Kente cloth. He acquired art training at the College of Art, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, one of the highest-ranking universities in Ghana. In 1975, when he had graduated from the university, El began teaching at the Fine Arts Department, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He taught at UNN for over four decades as a Professor of Sculpture.

Ayegbayo Damola

Our second painter can also be found in West Africa. This time, we travel to Nigeria, where none other than Ayegbayo Damola was born in 1988. He is a nigerian portrait artist, one of the most praised and significant diasporic African artists on the contemporary scene

Ayegbayo currently works and lives in Ibadan in Oyo state, but remains strongly connected to his home in Osun state.

He obtained his Bachelor’s in Education in Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife, from the Department of Fine and Applied Arts where he specialized in painting. His works convey the power of the beauty of black African women, the reality of life and morals through color and black beautiful women faces.

The Osun born artist was inspired by his late grandfather who was a painter, sculptor and ceramist from a tender age. He was a Visual Artist with a demonstrated history of working in the arts and crafts industry. Skilled in Paintings and Drawings.

Ayegbayo is undoubtedly one of the most famous painters today. The male artist depicts sensually painted figures, taking on often thought-provoking subjects. The starting point for almost any painting is found images or images of his immediate environment. Doing so, he evokes first-hand emotions with second-hand images, simultaneously examining what is universal, collective, and personal.

His monumental paintings in the capital city in Osun state, can be interpreted as abstract landscapes, using various media on various surfaces inspired by architectural plans, photography, city maps, and more.

Ayegbayo has also been features internationally where his artworks has been used as book covers and also for Exhibitions. In 2022, HarperCollins Publishers LLC USA featured his painting “unconditional love series 2” as a book cover title ‘Relations an anthology of African and Diaspora voices a book written by Nana Ekua Brew Hammond

And His work titled “purpose of existence” A private collection and also a cover art for a campaign to support promoting black women’s mental health in 2022 by the Cambridge University Press United Kingdom.

Some of his works has been acquired by Iwalewa Art Gallery, Nigeria, Art Colony Gallery, Nigeria, Standard Chartered Bank – global collection, Nigeria, KPMG Collection, Nigeria and can be found in Various private collection in United Kingdom, Canada, United states, Norway, Vietnam, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, France, etc

He was also nominated at the 2024 edition of JOM Charity Awards.

Mutu Wangechi was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1972. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is considered one of the most important contemporary African artists in recent years.

Wangechi studied at Cooper Union for the Advancement of the Arts and Science where she received her BFA. In 2000 she received her MFA at the School of Art Sculpture at Yale University.

The work of the Kenya-born Wangechi Mutu, who trained as a sculptor and anthropologist, explores the contradictions of female and cultural identity and references colonial history, contemporary African politics, and the international fashion industry. Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional crafts, science fiction, and funkadelia, Mutu creates work that documents the contemporary myth making of endangered cultural heritage.

Piecing together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials, her elaborate collages mimic amputation, transplant operations, and bionic prosthetics. Her figures become satirical mutilations with grotesquely marred forms that have experienced perverse modification, echoing the atrocities of war or the “improvements” of plastic surgery.

Barbara Gladstone Gallery has hosted four solo exhibitions of Mutu’s work since 2010. The almost year-long presentation of A Promise to Communicate by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston will end on December 31. Among her many honors, Mutu won a United States Artist Grant in 2014 and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant in 2008, and was the Deutsche Guggenheim Artist of the Year in 2010.

Her work is a series of collaged magazine imagery, painted surfaces and found materials. The resulting image mimics amputation, transplant operations and bionic prosthetics. The forms morbidly denote the brutalities of war or self inflicted pain of plastic surgery for self-improvement.

Wangechi shows preference to the European physique, which has been adapted by Africans, ensuing social hierarchy and genocide.

She successfully marries attractiveness and revulsion to reveal a survivalist empowerment from horror and victimization.

Her materials vary from everything from glitter to fur, which she refers to as African identity and conflict. This in turn embodies the theme of identity crisis, leading to an unsettling demeanor.

She explores other themes of race, sexuality, violence, power, and consumerism and the conflict between nature and the African culture.

Chéri Samba

Born in 1956 in Kinto M’Vuila, Democratic Republic of Congo.
Lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.

At school, Chéri Samba draws in his school notebooks and imitates the humorous comics of the magazine Jeunes pour Jeunes. Aware of the success of his drawings, instead of following his father’s trade as a blacksmith, he left school and moved to Kinshasa in 1972.

At first he had difficulty finding a job, an episode in his life that inspired the painting L’espoir fait vivre (1989). He finally found a job with Mbuta-Masunda, a painter of advertising signs, who hired him on the condition that he passed two tests: reproducing a photograph of an old father with a pencil, and a calligraphic work in “gothic” letters.

Having never heard this word, he draws letters of his own invention which please a lot and ensure him this job. He then worked for the entertainment newspaper Bilenge Info on the adventures of Lolo m’a déçu, the story of a married man and his young mistress, which had already made him popular when, on October 10, 1975, he moved to 89, at the corner of Kasa-Vubu and Birmanie avenues, in the Ngiri-Ngiri area: “My life and my work are a whole. There was a joyful competition between artists and to differentiate myself, I created the “Sambaïan label”. I had my look, my advertisements, my banners in front of the studio, my letterhead and business cards with photo, my Chéri Samba stamp… I wanted to make a maximum communication. One is never better served than by oneself!”

His paintings are always painted in a rich chromatic palette, vivid, contrasted and most often glittery as to play down the subject. Whatever his message, Chéri Samba wants to make the spectators enter his paintings without apprehension: “When I undertake a painting, I define the subject, the idea, the message, the very title. The image is clearly in my head, even the colors… I draw the subject precisely with a pencil, right down to the details, directly on the canvas, without any preliminary sketch. I allow myself up to three versions of the same painting, but slightly different.”

In 1975, he made his first self-portrait, and in 1985, he decided to make himself the regular subject of his paintings so that his name as well as his face would be recognized: “Whether the subjects of my paintings concern me directly or not, I prefer to represent myself anyway. Since I am the one who paints, these are my ideas, I decide on the subject, I decide on the comments… so why put someone else’s face instead of mine? Having noticed that the spectators pass by the paintings with only a wink, Chéri Samba also puts texts, or comments, within his paintings. The writing thus attracts attention and allows one to better admire and penetrate the work. The artist describes this style as “Samba’s claw”. For him art has no boundaries. The themes he tackles are universal: he stages current events, morals, sexuality, illness, social inequalities, corruption, etc.

Enfant Précoce

An emerging Cameroonian artist, the self-taught Enfant Précoce, or Francis Essoua Kalu, creates colorful, busy and vibrant scenes of people, nature, and fantastical beings. Rather than his works being charged with political or social commentary, the artist prefers that the spectator enter their own realm of fantasy and imagination to appreciate them.

Born in 1989 in Cameroon, Francis is based out of Paris, France, where he signs his work “Enfant Précoce” (Precocious Child) – as from even the youngest age, he always knew he would be an artist.

Largely inspired by his uncle Malam, also an artist. and his childhood in Cameroon, Enfant Précoce feeds his art with colors and mystical fantasies. He draws circles, squares, triangles: raw expression of his thoughts and dreams. Shapes become faces, and bodies, and animals which come to life, bringing us into his universe.

Each painting reads like a story: a colorful poem that embodies an idealized fantasy; a title, carefully chosen, like the chorus of a lullaby. It’s a voyage to the land of dreams. His use of bold lines and bright colors become a naive demonstration of the beauty of our chimeras. Because indeed his work is also about “us” – as Enfant Précoce covers universal topics that touch us all.

Characters juxtaposed with landscapes on a single piece encourages us to live simply and in the present moment. There is neither past or future in Enfant Précoce’s dreams.