African art finds come to auction on June 05. Bid in this live auction featuring African artworks from a single-owner collection sourced from the Mathias Komor Gallery in the 1960s.
Peggy Guggenheim challenged boundaries as a patron and collector and is celebrated for her groundbreaking European and American modern art collection. Migrating Objects: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection focuses on a lesser-known, but crucial episode in Guggenheim’s collecting: her turn in the 1950s and ’60s to works created by artists in Africa, Oceania, and the indigenous Americas. Migrating Objects represents a remarkable occasion to view 35 rarely seen non-Western artworks Guggenheim collected, shown at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection as a cohesive whole for the first time.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, a strict gendered division of artistic labour existed throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Men worked in wood and metal, carving and casting works that glorified leaders and paid homage to deities, while women created works in clay, cloth, and beads, stitching and firing the art of everyday life. This exhibition brings together two dozen works from the BMA's collection to demonstrate the critical role of women in shaping and maintaining social identities across 20th-century Africa.
10th sale of contemporary African art at PIASA.
The pieces selected for the auction have the potential to attract broad competition, and we have extensive experience engaging new potential buyers in all of our African and Oceanic art auctions in Paris, with our team of international experts based in Paris, London and New York, as well as our colleagues in cross-over collecting fields who will personally be on hand to promote these sales.
An extraordinary figure, the first 20th-century businesswoman, a self-made and emancipated woman, a visionary... There is no shortage of superlatives to describe the incredible rise to fame of Helena Rubinstein (1870-1965), dubbed the Empress of beauty by Cocteau, but her role as an experienced collector and a pioneer in the recognition of African and Oceanic arts in Europe and North America is often overlooked. Primarily amassed in Paris through her various encounters, "Madame’s collection", now dispersed, comprised over 400 pieces of non-European art including precious Kota and Fang reliquary guardians, exceptional Baoulé, Bamana, Senoufo and Dogon pieces. The exhibition places the spotlight on her passion for non-Western arts - primarily African art - through sixty pieces, as well as her fascination for their expressive intensity and character.
Highlights from this season’s curated Arts of Africa, Oceania and North America sale in Paris include works of art from the Collection of James and Marilynn Alsdorf featuring African masterpieces, such as a newly discovered Akan terracotta head and North American art. The Oceanic section of our April 8th sale is highlighted by a gope board and agipa hook both collected by Thomas Schultze-Westrum in Papua New Guinea. The African art section includes works from an Important European Private Collection, including a major Urhobo statue from Nigeria, a museum-quality Igbo couple and beautiful masks from the Fang, Chokwe and Punu. From a Belgian collection, an important Songye kifwebe masks will be offered at auction, as well as a rare Songye power figure with a turned head.
Taking its name from a 1970’s feminist anthem, I Am… Contemporary Women Artists of Africa draws upon a selection of artworks by women artists from the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art’s permanent collection to reveal a more contemporary feminism that recognizes the contributions of women to the most pressing issues of their times. With experimental and sophisticated use of diverse media, the 27 featured artists offer insightful and visually stunning approaches to matters of community, faith, the environment, politics, colonial encounters, racism, identity, and more.
Across central Africa’s matrilineal belt, the most important artworks were those that depicted the female body. In these 19th and early 20th century communities, group identity and familial responsibility flowed through the maternal line. Artists responded to this reality by sculpting visual markers of motherhood onto a range of objects associated with status and authority. In these societies, mothers not only created life and nurtured families but also stood at the centre of the moral order, ensuring the continuity of entire communities. From monumental headdresses of elderly mothers to sculptures that represent mythic female ancestors, this exhibition brings together nearly 40 objects from public and private collections to demonstrate how artists have represented the power of African mothers and used maternal imagery to signal moral, cultural, and spiritual authority.
The Museum of Modern Art announces Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde—From Signac to Matisse and Beyond, the first exhibition devoted to the influential French art critic, editor, publisher, dealer, and collector Félix Fénéon (1861–1944), on view from March 22 through July 25, 2020. Though largely unknown today and always discreetly behind the scenes in his own era, Fénéon played a key role in the careers of leading artists from Georges Seurat and Paul Signac to Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, each of whom is featured prominently in the exhibition. Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde—From Signac to Matisse and Beyond traces Fénéon’s career through approximately 150 works that highlight his initiatives to help artists via his reviews, exhibitions, and acquisitions; his commitment to anarchism; his literary engagements; and his contributions to the recognition of non-Western art. Bringing together a selection of major works that Fénéon admired, championed, and collected, alongside contemporary letters, documents, and photographs, the exhibition underscores the tremendous impact he had on the development of modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The first-ever UK exhibition by Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, this epic cycle of new work will explore an imagined ancient myth, with an immersive soundscape by artist Peter Adjaye. Toyin Ojih Odutola, recognising the pen as a ‘writing tool first’, plays with the idea that drawing can be a form of storytelling. Working exclusively with drawing materials including pastel and charcoal, she approaches her process of drawing as an investigative practice. Ojih Odutola proposes speculative fictions, inviting the viewer to enter her vision of an uncannily familiar yet fantastical world. Drawing on an eclectic range of references, from ancient history to popular culture to contemporary politics, Ojih Odutola encourages the viewer to piece together the fragments of the stories that she presents.
Among African cultures, deceased ancestors remain important members of the community who are revered in the afterlife. They are venerated by surviving family and community members who ask for divine intercession from their forebears in matters related to wealth, fertility, and agricultural prosperity. This exhibition focuses on NOMA’s recently acquired akwanshi stone monolith from the Cross River region of Nigeria, supported with figures and objects rendered in part or whole in stone from other regions of West Africa. The show speaks to the significance of stone as both a natural element and a significant material in the veneration of ancestors. Although carved stones represent ancestors, uncarved stones may also represent ancestors. Such characteristics suggest the importance of stone to this and other African cultures.
The Summer Exhibition has run without interruption since 1769 and we don’t intend to break that streak in 2020. It is the world’s largest open submission art show, and anyone can apply to enter. Each year, a committee of diverse artists choose an array of art in all mediums – prints and paintings, film and photography, sculpture, architectural works and more – for everyone and anyone to enjoy. You’ll see work by leading artists, Royal Academicians and household names, as well as new and emerging talent you might not know. So, explore art you love, art you hate, and art that simply puts a smile on your face.
The first major survey of the celebrated London-based painter. Widely considered to be one of the most important painters of her generation, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British artist and writer acclaimed for her enigmatic portraits of fictitious people. Her paintings often allude to historic European portraiture – notably Francisco de Goya, John Singer Sargent and Édouard Manet – yet in subject matter and technique, her approach is decidedly contemporary. Through her focus on the depiction of imagined black characters, Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings raise important questions of identity and representation. This exhibition will bring together over 80 paintings and works on paper from 2003 to the present day in the most extensive survey of the artist’s career to date.
The BRUNEAF (Brussels Non European Art Fair) has now become one of the leading exhibitions on African tribal art in the world. BRUNEAF developed from the first unified public presentation of a handful of tribal antique dealers in 1983 in the Sablon area. It is now one of the leading such fairs in Europe. Since 1996, the fair has included international galleries, including France, Italy, Spain, the UK, Netherlands, and the US. Today, it includes African, Oceanian, Indonesian, pre-Columbian, Asiatic, and Australian Aboriginal art.
Parcours des Mondes is widely recognized as the world’s most important tribal art fair due to the quality and diversity of its participants. Since 2002, each year it has brought together some sixty galleries specializing in the arts of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.
Set in the vibrant heart of Mayfair, PAD is London’s leading fair for 20th Century art, design and decorative arts. Inspiring a unique spirit of collecting, PAD epitomises how modern art, photography, design, decorative and tribal arts interact to reveal astonishing combinations and create the most individual and staggering interiors. Prominent international galleries from major cities across Europe, North America and Asia come together to offer an exceptional panorama of the most coveted and iconic works available on the market today. PAD is a place to discover and acquire pieces of museum quality with a distinct history. PAD cultivates eclecticism, authenticity and connoisseurship with passion and flair.
Frieze Masters features more than 130 leading modern and historical galleries from around the world, showcasing art from the ancient era and Old Masters to the late 20th century.
1-54 is the first leading international art fair dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Founding by Touria El Glaoui, the fair holds annual editions in London since 2013, New York since 2015 and Marrakech since 2018. Drawing reference to the fifty-four countries that constitute the African continent, 1-54 is a sustainable and dynamic platform that is engaged in contemporary dialogue and exchange.
Frieze London features more than 160 of the world’s leading galleries. View and buy art from over 1,000 of today’s leading artists, and experience the fair’s critically acclaimed curated sections and Talks programme.
Tate Modern presents the first major mid-career survey of visual activist Zanele Muholi in the UK. Born in South Africa, Muholi came to prominence in the early 2000s with photographs that sought to envision black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex lives beyond deviance or victimhood. Muholi’s work challenges hetero-patriarchal ideologies and representations, presenting the participants in their photographs as confident and beautiful individuals bravely existing in the face of prejudice, intolerance and, frequently, violence. While Muholi’s intimate photographs of others launched their international career, their intense self-portraits solidified it. This exhibition will present the full breadth of Muholi’s photographic and activist practice.
PAD, pioneering event for Art and Design aficionados and collectors, has been reinventing for the past 20 years the Cabinet d’Amateur and the notion of eclecticism, anticipating the aesthetic aspirations of its time. Season after season, it offers an intimate cocoon to those who have made decorative arts and design the core of their collection, driven by passion and heritage. Every edition evolves in aim to create an unprecedented dialogue between modern art, historical and contemporary design and jewellery. This year will give greater room to Primitive Art, and will highlight the vitality of raising such perspectives. The engaging aspect of PAD is its invitation to enter a personal collection, conceived by a selection of local and international art dealers – all of whom are leaders in their fields, eager to address each passionate collector in a unique manner. In this salon, mind is enlivened and imagination is exhilarated, as entering a place where the contemporary taste for 20th and 21st Century decorative art is born.
The practice of El Anatsui (b. 1944, Anyako, Ghana), possibly the most prominent African artist today, exemplifies a neverending search for models that offer an alternative to the modernist canons of purity. This retrospective will be the most ambitious ever presented of Anatsui’s career and will cover all the series and mediums used by the artist over five decades of work. The exhibition pays special attention to the most monumental aspect of Anatsui’s sculptures, through emblematic pieces created over the past twenty years with plastic bottle caps as a fundamental component.
As the world's most buoyant art market, New York City provides the ideal context for a TEFAF Fair outside Maastricht, and allows a vital, transatlantic meeting ground for a global community of dealers, collectors, curators, interior designers and art-and-antiques enthusiasts. We are proud to present TEFAF New York Fall, with a focus on fine and decorative arts from antiquity to 1920.
ART X Lagos is West Africa’s premier international art fair, designed to showcase the best and most innovative contemporary art from the African continent and its Diaspora. Launched in 2016, the art fair has since become a cornerstone of the Lagos art calendar, drawing local patrons and a host of international collectors, curators, and critics annually.
In 2020 it will be exactly one hundred years ago that Antwerp, in full colonial time, acquired its Congolese museum collection. What are the stories behind the Congolese objects? And how did they end up in the port city? The exhibition focuses on a hundred unique Congolese works and examines their significance for various Congolese peoples. You learn about the impact of Christian missions on Congolese culture and about the view of Congolese people on the 'white' (global).
African Arts—Global Conversations puts African arts where they rightfully belong: within the global art historical canon. It brings those works into greater, meaningful art historical conversations and critiques previous ways that encyclopedic museums and the field of art have or have not included them. African Arts—Global Conversations presents thirty-three works, including twenty by African artists. Highlights include a celebrated eighteenth-century Kuba sculpture, fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Ethiopian Orthodox processional crosses, and a mid-twentieth-century Sierra Leonean Ordehlay or Jollay society mask. Also featured are recent works by Atta Kwami, Ranti Bam, Magdalene Odundo OBE, and Taiye Idahor, which are paired with artworks by Māori, Seminole, Spanish, American, Huastec, and Korean artists.
Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa is the first major exhibition addressing the scope of Saharan trade and the shared history of West Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe from the eighth to sixteenth centuries. Weaving stories about interconnected histories, the exhibition showcases the objects and ideas that connected at the crossroads of the medieval Sahara and celebrates West Africa’s historic and under-recognised global significance. Presenting more than 250 artworks spanning five centuries and a vast geographic expanse, the exhibition features unprecedented loans from partner institutions in Mali, Morocco, and Nigeria, many of which will be seen in North America for the first time.
Second Careers explores the connections between historical African art and contemporary practices through a selection of exemplary highlights from the museum’s African collection and loaned works. CMA objects from nine cultures in Central and West Africa—male and female figures and masks, masquerade costume, a hunter’s tunic, and a prestige throne—are juxtaposed with large-scale installations, sculptures, and photographs by six leading contemporary African artists. The exhibition considers the status of canonical African art objects when they begin their “second careers” upon entering museum collections.
The Linden-Museum Stuttgart presents its new permanent exhibition "Wo ist Afrika?" from 16 March 2019. "Wo ist Afrika?" invites the visitor to critically explore and re-evaluate contexts and narratives associated to Linden-Museum Stuttgart’s collection of artefacts from the African continent. The exhibition shows how the collections were established, how they developed over time, and which rules of classification they adhered to. A large part of the objects on display were acquired from Cameroon, the Congo basin, Mozambique, Nigeria and Tanzania between the end of 19th and the first half of the 20th, at the height of the European "Scramble for Africa". "Wo ist Afrika?" examines stories and histories inscribed into these objects and what they can mean for us today. The exhibition opens up a space of cultural creativity, which allows the visitors to near themselves to a wider understanding of culture. "Wo ist Afrika?" has a process-oriented approach, questioning the authority of the museum by showing a multitude of parallel narratives and asking important questions addressed to our contemporary societal cohabitation.
The DMA’s Conservation and Arts of Africa departments, in an exciting and cutting-edge collaboration with UT Southwestern Medical Center, will present CT scans of a Senufo helmet mask from the Museum’s African art collection. This kind of mask is worn like a helmet by a medium at initiations, funerals, harvest celebrations and secret events conducted by the powerful male-only Komo society, which has traditionally maintained social and spiritual harmony in Senufo villages in Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Visible attachments on the mask include a female figure, cowrie shells, and imported glassware. The CT-scans reveal unexpected materials beneath the surface and objects contained in the attached animal horns that empower the mask.
Widely considered to be one of the most important painters of her generation, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British artist and writer acclaimed for her enigmatic portraits of fictitious people. In order to capture the unique moment of the flow of consciousness, each one is completed in a single sitting. Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings often allude to historic European portraiture – notably Thomas Gainsborough, Francisco de Goya, John Singer Sargent and Édouard Manet – yet in subject matter and technique her approach is decidedly contemporary. This exhibition will bring together over 80 paintings and works on paper from 2003 to the present day in the most extensive survey of the artist’s career to date.
After the Tate Modern in London, the MEP will present the first major retrospective in France devoted to the work of the South African "visual activist" Zanele Muholi. Born in South Africa, Zanele Muholi began to distinguish themselves at the dawn of the 2000s with photos seeking to document the life of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer or intersex people, far from the representation that is usually made between deviance and victimisation. The work of Zanele Muholi defies ideology and hetero-patriarchal representations, presenting their subjects as confident, beautiful beings, who dare to exist with courage despite prejudice, intolerance and very often violence towards them.
1-54 is the first leading international art fair dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. Founding by Touria El Glaoui, the fair holds annual editions in London since 2013, New York since 2015 and Marrakech since 2018. Drawing reference to the fifty-four countries that constitute the African continent, 1-54 is a sustainable and dynamic platform that is engaged in contemporary dialogue and exchange.
The Burgundy Tribal Show is the first international tribal art fair to be held in the countryside. In a rural setting, and a relaxed atmosphere conducive to discovery, the Burgundy Tribal Show offers its audience a distinctly different experience.
Masterpiece London is the unmissable art fair at which visitors can view and buy the finest works of art, design, furniture and jewellery - from antiquity to the present day. The Fair offers an unparalleled opportunity for new and established collectors to discover exceptional works for sale across a range of price points from 160 international exhibitors and across every major market discipline.
Tribal Art London is the only Tribal Art Fair of its kind in the UK, showcasing a select group of exhibitors displaying tribal art from around the world. Each piece has been chosen for its quality and authenticity.
This exhibition highlights artistic innovation and creativity in Africa as seen primarily through the traditions of ceramic arts from across the continent and over its long history. Countering the assumption that African arts and societies are largely unchanging and bound to traditions and customs, the remarkable diversity of objects and styles on display here tells a different story. A selection of more than 50 works on loan from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, including those by newly discovered Nigerian artist Alice Osayewe, are shown alongside works from the Harvard Art Museums permanent collections, such as a recently acquired contemporary photograph by Afro-futurist artist Alexis Peskine.
Be your best. This is the quest that the greatest of heroes model for us. Through their journeys, struggles, and triumphs, exceptional individuals exemplify values that we celebrate in tales of heroic accomplishment. Through art, artists tell such stories—stories of the world’s current complexity, but also visions of a world that could yet be. Heroes: Principles of African Greatness features artworks from the National Museum of African Art’s permanent collection that tell the story of key heroic principles and personages in Africa’s arts and history. Throughout, core values are considered as each artwork is paired with a specific historic African individual who embodies the value expressed in the selected work. Discover Africa’s heroes—some well-known, others perhaps surprising—and see artworks in new ways.
Connecting African art collectors with dealers and scholars, based on a foundation of knowledge about the origin, use & distinguishing features of listed pieces
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