Art Salon: A Group Exhibition of Sulger-Buel Artists

3 October - 1 December 2022
  • Contemporary African and Middle Eastern artists

    Sulger-Buel Gallery is pleased to present a new online exhibition entitled 'ART SALON' which celebrates a selection of eleven artists at the forefront of contemporary African and Middle Eastern art.

     

    Spanning over eleven countries, 'ART SALON' includes works by artists Steve Bandoma, Soly Cissé, COMBO, Isabelle Grobler, Fathi Hassan, Maliza Kiasuwa, Vivien Kohler, Hyacinthe Ouattara, Carolyn Parton, Ghizlane Sahli and Collin Sekajugo. The diversity of media presented, including painting, sculpture, digital print, collage, and other works on paper, reflects the vibrant creativity of the participating artists.

     

    This online exhibition complements and expands the forthcoming physical exhibition at the Sulger-Buel Gallery at The Loft, 51 Surrey Row, Unit 2 La Gare, London, SE1 0BZ.

    • Fathi Hassan, Sto Male VII, 1991
      Fathi Hassan, Sto Male VII, 1991
    • Fathi Hassan, Sto Male VI, 1991
      Fathi Hassan, Sto Male VI, 1991
  • STEVE BANDOMA

    Soly Cissé

    COMBO

    ISABELLE GROBLER

    FATHI HASSAN

    MALIZA KIASUWA

    Vivien Kohler

    Hyacinthe Ouattara

    CAROLYN PARTON

    COLLIN SEKAJUGO



     
  • Steve Bandoma

  • Steve Bandoma

    Born 1981 in Kinshasa, D.R.C

    Lives and works in Kinshasa, D.R.C

     

    A graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Steve Bandoma is an arts and political activist who speaks truth to power through his hard-hitting works. While his CV includes numerous exhibitions, prestigious awards, and residencies, he remains dedicated to furthering contemporary art in his home country. 

     

    Bandoma's art is at once a powerful mode of socio-political critique and a platform of conceptual exploration and formal innovation. Thematically his work addresses the intersections of global capitalism, consumer culture, identity politics and the scourge of neo-colonialism as it manifests in Africa.  By citing imperial and religious history, classicism and myth, he uses intertextuality to reveal the complex relationships between the past and present.

    The artist predominantly works in mixed media on paper. Working as a subversive bricoleur, his sculptural and installation works are similarly assemblages of found and recycled objects.

     

    While working from an African context, his work addresses universal themes and speaks to the human condition. The significance of his contemporary artistic expression is recognised through his inclusion in such group exhibitions as Beauty Congo at the Cartier Foundation in Paris (2015), the 1- 54 Contemporary African Art Fairs in London and New York (2014, 2015), and the travelling exhibition Kongo Across the Water (2014-2015). His work featured in Evora Africa in Portugal (2018) and was most recently included in Kinshasa Megapolis in Leipzig and the Lubumbashi Biennale, Kinshasa. Bandoma has had several solo exhibitions in the DRC and South Africa, in Europe, the USA and the United Kingdom. He's received scholarships from Pro Helvetica, Greatmore Studios and Design Indaba and held residences at the Nirox Foundation in Johannesburg, the French Institute in Kinshasa and the International City of the Arts, Paris.

    • Steve Bandoma, Original Sin, 2018
      Steve Bandoma, Original Sin, 2018
    • Steve Bandoma, Jeu Kizengi, 2018
      Steve Bandoma, Jeu Kizengi, 2018
  • Soly Cissé

  • Soly Cissé

    Born 1969 in Senegal

    Lives and works in Dakar, Senegal

    Soly Cissé is a mixed media painter and sculptor from Dakar, one of Senegal's most celebrated artists. Cissé's artworks are profoundly inspired by and contextualized through his upbringing. He grew up during an epoch of transition, following Senegal's period of social and political unrest, where art served as mode of social activism and self-expression for the disenfranchised persons. His work, like a portal where the imagined and physical realms convene, intuitively explores notions of duality and repetition; tradition and modernity, the spiritual and the secular.

     

     

    "I think and reflect a lot about humans and their relationships. Relationships between humans, the confrontation between humans and nature, humans and religion and then I challenge myself and experiment."

     

    Cissé's spontaneous painterly movements, textured accents and neo-expressionistic techniques form depictions reflective of the dissolution of society's moral thresholds, shifts attributable to globalization and modernization. Shapeless human characters distort into anthropomorphic shadows of the other self; identities lost in translation from the past to the contemporary, and abstract lines and bold strokes of contrasting hues intersect, creating a layered configuration of Cissé's mythical visions. 

     

    Cissé graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar, in 1996. He has had numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums in Europe, the Americas and throughout Africa. Cissé's recent exhibitions include Les Mutants, Musée Dapper, Paris; Lumières d'Afriques, African Artists for Development, Palais de Chaillot, Paris (2015); and Solycolor, Musée des Arts Derniers, Paris (2009). His work also featured in the seminal exhibition Africa Remix (2004-2007), Dak'Art - Biennale de l'Art African Contemporain (2006), the Havana Biennial (2000) and Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil (1998). He is listed by Forbes as among the top 100 contemporary African Artists based on monetary value alone.

    • Soly Cissé, Men and Lives I, 2017
      Soly Cissé, Men and Lives I, 2017
    • Soly Cissé, Men and Lives II, 2017
      Soly Cissé, Men and Lives II, 2017
  • COMBO

    COMBO

  • COMBO (aka Combo Culture Kidnapper)
    Born 1987 in Amiens
    , France to a Lebanese-Christian father and a Moroccan-Muslim mother
    Having graduated from Villa Arson in Nice, his work began with graffiti around the French Riviera. After some time working as artistic director for advertising agencies in Paris, by 2012 he decided to dedicate his time to his real passion through street art, wherein his signature style imports and recycles popular cultural icons, urban myths, comics, cartoons, video games, paintings, photography; and, also, calling for peace between people of different faiths through his 'CoeXist' posters after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015. Combo's work is always an expression of his humanistic ethos, a call for understanding as well as taking risks to convey strong messages combined with his travels around the world. 
    For example, he infiltrated the forbidden area of Chernobyl to post advertising posters denouncing nuclear energy in relation to the anniversary of the accident at the Fukushima Plant. He also postedGoogle pages in Hong Kong that had been banned by the communist party including the arrest of artist Ai Weiwei. Later in Beirut, Lebanon he posted ‘Less Hamas, More Hummus'; and, at the start of 2017, he parodied posters of the candidates for the French presidential election by posting electoral billboards. With the majority of his work made of wheat-pasted prints that he un-pastes and then pastes back on canvas, his most famous graffiti work to date has been the 'CoeXist' project in which the artist campaigned for religious tolerance by a visual text incorporating the signs of the three Abrahamic faiths: a Muslimcrescent (for the letter c), a star of David for the X and a Christian cross for the T. He was, in fact, beaten up and attacked in 2015 whilst painting a wall at Porte Dorée near Paris as part of the project. Always making reference in his work to current and topical news, he is a master at manipulating cultural symbols with historical and contemporary figures as well as by adding textual quotes to encourage the viewer to think about freedom, civil liberties, capitalism, consumerism, religion and extremist politics. The purpose of his practice is to advocate peace, harmony, diversity and to challenge all stereotypes. According to the artist himself: “My pieces work in a disruptive way, they surprise. They are where they shouldn’t be.” 
    • COMBO, CoeXisT I, 2019
      COMBO, CoeXisT I, 2019
  • Isabelle Grobler

  • Isabelle Grobler

    Born in Pretoria, South Africa

    Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa

     

    Specialising in sculptural installation, painting, drawing and printmaking, Isabelle Grobler's work explores notions of hierarchies and power relations in a world fractured by economic and socio-political paradoxes. While her sculpture utilises a variety of discarded and obsolete objects as a starting point, she creates surreal environments populated by hybrid machine-organisms constructed from urban debris. In her painting she looks to 'found concepts and ideas' rather than found objects und draws on the history of art as a starting point for her work.

    The spaces she constructs in both her installations and paintings are dreamlike and alien: based on reality, but reconfigured by the unconscious, where recognisable things and ideas have been shuffled and reinterpreted to produce a Kafkaesque ambiguity. The characters vacillate, like Frankenstein's monster, between the threatening and the pathetic, representing a transformation of dead things into unclassifiable beings.

    Grobler used a residency in Jaffa, Israel as a starting point to develop a body of work called the cannibals' congress. This forms part of her ongoing project the cannibals' banquet where she explores the politics of consumption as a psychological and social human function.

     

    Grobler was born is Pretoria and grew up in Bloemfontein, South Africa. She spent her childhood years between the family farm and town. She completed her BA degree in Fine Art at the University of the Free State in 2009 and her Master of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2012 (cum laude). She was the overall winner of the African Continental juried Lovell Art Competition in 2014. She has exhibited in South Africa, the UK and Israel, in galleries and art fairs including a highly reviewed solo booth at Art15 London. Grobler has had two solo exhibitions at Sulger-Buel Lovell, namely A Gnaw of Cannibals in 2016 and The Meatgrinder Madrigal in 2018 curated by Andrew Lamprecht was also exhibited at AKAA 2018 in Paris, France.

    • Isabelle Grobler, Bang!, 2018
      Isabelle Grobler, Bang!, 2018
    • Isabelle Grobler, Still Birth, 2018
      Isabelle Grobler, Still Birth, 2018
  • Fathi Hassan

  • Fathi Hassan
    Born 1957 in Cairo, Egypt
    Lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland

     
    Fathi Hassan was born in Cairo in 1957 to Nubian and Egyptian parents. His family were forced to leave their homeland of Nubia when the Aswan High Dam was built in 1952, flooding a vast area now under Lake Nasser. Whether in photographs, paintings, installations, drawings or, often, directly on walls, his texts are deliberately illegible intended to highlight the plight of lost languages and oral history as a result of colonial domination. In his early twenties he obtained a grant to study at Naples Art School and, after graduating in 1984, he continued to live for many years in Italy. Latterly working between Italy and Great Britain, he finally took up residence in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2018.

    In his work Hassan experiments with the written and spoken word, exploring the theme of ancient languages erased by colonialism. With invented Kufic-inspired scripts, he plays with the symbols, textures and calligraphy of his Nubian heritage to explore the space between graphic symbolism and literal meaning in vibrant colours and collage. Forms are often given to these texts which can become as important as the text itself. These tend to be the organic forms of the natural world: the human face, leaves, plants, flowers, animals, the universe and its heavenly bodies. For many years Hassan also experimented with the vase form in his highly regarded series of Containers.


    His work is in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, London and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington DC and Farjam Collections among many others.

    • Fathi Hassan, Elephantine Island, 2020
      Fathi Hassan, Elephantine Island, 2020
    • Fathi Hassan, Nubian Warrior II, 2020
      Fathi Hassan, Nubian Warrior II, 2020
  • Maliza Kiasuwa

  • Maliza Kiasuwa

    Born 1975 in Bucharest and raised in Kinshasa, (Democratic Republic of Congo)

    Lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya

     
    Maliza Kiasuwa lives on a disaffected farm by the lake of Naivasha, in the hearth of the great Rift Valley — an African garden of Eden. The coexistence of these two worlds is an endless source of inspiration: her art reflects both the raw beauty of African wilderness and the African art of recycling, stitching and mending. Her sculptures and collages are made of bits and pieces that she collects during her daily expeditions: cotton threads, handmade ropes made of straw or rubber, plastic bags stranded on the lake shore. Sometimes Maliza Kiasuwa combines local materials with handmade fabrics such as Japanese Washi paper. She likes to put together stuff that does not belong together.
     
    Maliza Kiasuwa is a self-taught artist who creates works that produce stimulating and eclectic elements. She is fascinated by natural laws that govern the cycles of life and the power of nature. Her interest in these transformative and regenerative processes come from a desire to understand the mystery of ageing and death, as a process that is crucial to our existence. She transforms everyday articles combining reductive methods of shredding, twisting with constructive processes of tying, weaving stitching and dyeing. By doing so, Kiasuwa gives objects a new life and shape, while trying to preserve the integrity and the origin of each element of the process. She also paints and draws, and likes to switch from one to the other. She seeks to honor nature and reconcile man and nature by assembling various textures that she sows together as a surgeon would do after a serious injury.
     
    • Maliza Kiasuwa, The Pride of Origins, 2021
      Maliza Kiasuwa, The Pride of Origins, 2021
  • Vivien Kohler

  • Vivien Kohler

    Born 1976 in Johannesburg, South Africa

    Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa

     

    Vivien Kohler is an experimental mixed media painter based in Johannesburg, South Africa. The concept of liminality; the liminal city and its people, lies at the core of Kohler's work, which explores migration, marginalization and displacement in the urban landscape of post-Apartheid South Africa.

     

    Kohler constructs two and three dimensional assemblage pieces; appropriating discarded material, painting naturalistic figures and detailed replications of packaging material (a layered visual metaphor signifying transience, migration, displacement), to articulate challenging social and economic circumstances that affect those on the periphery. "My works do not hide the realities of the unfair perception, but symbolically display it in relations to the liberating verdict of the human spirit". Fascinated by man's ability to transcend 'the conceptual decay', he captures with gentle rawness the complexity of the human disposition. His work seeks to illuminate the duality of lived experiences by depicting, with an air of surreality, meditative moments of the individual, mentally cocooned from, yet physically enveloped by life's detritus.

    • Vivien Kohler, Of Iron and Clay, 2014
      Vivien Kohler, Of Iron and Clay, 2014
    • Vivien Kohler, Discerecloth, 2018
      Vivien Kohler, Discerecloth, 2018
  • Hyacinthe Ouattara

  • Hyacinthe Ouattara
    Born in 1981 in Diebougou, Burkina Faso
    Lives and works in Paris, France
     

    Hyacinthe Ouattara is a self-taught plastic artist. After several experiences in workshops, he trained in drawing. He began to represent the human body in a dreamlike, ghostly and childlike way, before focusing his work on the anatomy of cellular tissues through “human maps”.

     

    Material, texture and colours are of great importance in his work. His way of painting is predominantly spontaneous and gestural, while his installations often play with the theme of the suspension between balance and imbalance.

     

    His twisted textile sculptures – inspired by organic forms – allow him to reflect on the concept of memory, whilst questioning the ambivalences between appearance and disappearance, and intimacy and identity.

    His works have been successfully exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Dakar, Ouagadougou, Accra, Luxembourg and Kalgoorlie.
     
    • Hyacinthe Ouattara, Multiplicity III, 2020
      Hyacinthe Ouattara, Multiplicity III, 2020
  • Carolyn Parton

  • Carolyn Parton

    Born 1964 in Cape Town, South Africa
    Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa

     

    Carolyn Parton is primarily a sculptural painter, innovatively extending the medium through her exploration of paint as physical matter; embedded with memory. Her research article Extended Traces: Tracking the impact of painter upon environment was published in 2010.

    Collecting spent paint - particularly that which has a backstory - from local housepainters to acclaimed international artists, she develops methods to reclaim this paint, incorporating it as a remnant of environment and history.

    Like an archaeologist, Parton explores crucial moments of human evolution to understand who we are in the present, as we stand at the cusp of an environmental challenge that will determine our legacy. Her sculpted paint cascades, landscapes of cosmic paint dust particles, stratified paint fragment installations, paint cloth mosaics with pallet remnants and clustered jewel like paint tubes, become the archive.

     

    Her most recent project is influenced by the current debate in South Africa around decolonisation. Exploring this moment has led to her taking apart the works from books that were a part of her art studies over decades - cutting, and re-arranging them. The project is part of an ongoing process of re-thinking her sociocultural/environmental context.

     

    Parton holds an Advanced Diploma in Graphic Design, Cape Town University of Technology and a Bachelor of art in Fine Art (cum laude) from the University of South Africa, 2008. Her solo exhibitions include Emergence (1997), Release (2009) and This Remembering Land (2015). She has taken part in numerous group exhibitions throughout South Africa and in London and Rome. Her work is included in permanent collections such as Southern African Foundation for Contemporary Art, University of Cape Town, University of South Africa and The Constitutional Court of South Africa. Prior to practising full time as an artist, she worked as a creative director in the design industry. She currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

    • Carolyn Parton, Fictions From Facts No.1, 2015
      Carolyn Parton, Fictions From Facts No.1, 2015
  • Collin Sekajugo

  • Collin Sekajugo
    Born 1980 in Masaka, Uganda
    Lives and works between Rwanda and Uganda
     

    Utilizing elements of collage, precisely defined by colour, and sweeping, energetic hand-drawn lines in his works, Collin Sekajugo proposes a conversation with the viewer; literally producing communicative art. As a fervent critic of ethnocentrism in all its forms, he draws on multiple cultural sources to create images that engage the viewer simultaneously with a sense of familiarity and strangeness in their composition. Each work is a plea for tolerance, a statement against racism, violence and discrimination; each is also an ambiguous entrance into the artist’s uncompromising view of the world, whether it be a chat or an argument.

    Sekajugo has exhibited extensively internationally and is represented in many major galleries. He divides his time between running community art projects that he founded in Rwanda (2007) and Uganda (2011) and his own art practice.
     
    • Collin Sekajugo, All on Her, 2020
      Collin Sekajugo, All on Her, 2020
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