Oil On Canvas By Mwenze Kibwanga (1925-1999), Congolese Painter, Former Belgian Congo

Oil on canvas by Mwenze Kibwanga (1925-1999), Congolese painter (former Belgian Congo, current Democratic Republic of Congo). Dimensions 94.5 x 76.0 cm. Signed Mwenze Kibwanga lower right and dated (19)62. Pierre-Romain Desfossés, painter and former Breton officer in the French Navy, passionate about African art and fascinated by the talents of local Congolese artists, decided to open the doors of his studio to them in 1946 in Élisabethville (today Lubumbashi). Nicknamed the Hangar, this place then took the official name of Academy of Indigenous Popular Art. In 1950, Mwenze Kibwanga was admitted. This academy made it possible to assert a painting influenced by the traditions and spontaneity of primitive arts in rupture with traditional Western aesthetic canons. The human figure is omnipresent in these scenes of daily life: hunting, work, dancing. Mwenze Kibwanga does not seek perspective effects or respect for academic standards: he paints in an essentially decorative spirit. If Mwenze Kibwanga painted with his thumb until 1952, his style is then characterized by a technique stemming from Divisionism, based on hatching made of thick brush strokes, alternating warm and cold tones (ochres and beiges, browns and blacks, greens and blacks). His technique is made of small bars adopting the shape of objects. These zebra stripes echo the twists of the weaver's trade that his father practiced.