Chéri Samba dans la collection Jean Pigozzi.
The exhibition
Hello, Mr. Samba!
Chéri Samba owes his title of "popular painter" to the fact that, at the age of 16, he left school and his village for the urban cauldron that was Kinshasa in the 1970s. He also owes it to the very direct style of his painting, a chronicle of everyday life in Kinshasa - in which he frequently indulges in the pleasure of staging himself - and of the way the world works - which he never ceases to enjoy. Often overt, the words he writes in his paintings are the best commentary: "What future for our art?" he insists in a 1997 triptych in which he portrays Picasso as his double. All from the collection of Jean Pigozzi, for whom André Magnin assembled the most extensive group of works by Chéri Samba in the aftermath of the Les Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in 1989, fifty of his paintings are on show at the Musée Maillol.
Excerpt from an article by Tom Laurent to be published in Art magazine N°108 Absolument.
Chéri Samba in the Jean Pigozzi collection. Musée Maillol, Paris. From October 17, 2023 to April 7, 2024
Chéri Samba owes his title of "popular painter" to the fact that, at the age of 16, he left school and his village for the urban cauldron that was Kinshasa in the 1970s. He also owes it to the very direct style of his painting, a chronicle of everyday life in Kinshasa - in which he frequently indulges in the pleasure of staging himself - and of the way the world works - which he never ceases to enjoy. Often overt, the words he writes in his paintings are the best commentary: "What future for our art?" he insists in a 1997 triptych in which he portrays Picasso as his double. All from the collection of Jean Pigozzi, for whom André Magnin assembled the most extensive group of works by Chéri Samba in the aftermath of the Les Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in 1989, fifty of his paintings are on show at the Musée Maillol.
Excerpt from an article by Tom Laurent to be published in Art magazine N°108 Absolument.
Chéri Samba in the Jean Pigozzi collection. Musée Maillol, Paris. From October 17, 2023 to April 7, 2024
When
17/10/2023 - 07/04/2024
