Chéri Samba valuation
Congolese painter of Kinshasa life, politics and himself, in bright figurative scenes full of text.
Chéri Samba was born in 1956 in the Lower Congo region and moved to Kinshasa in his teens, where he worked as a sign painter and drew comic strips for magazines before opening his own studio in 1975.
What a work by Chéri Samba is worth
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Bio
Chéri Samba was born in 1956 in the Lower Congo region and moved to Kinshasa in his teens, where he worked as a sign painter and drew comic strips for magazines before opening his own studio in 1975. With painters such as Moke and Chéri Chérin he became a leading figure of Kinshasa's popular painting, and his canvases combine bright, flat figures, often including himself, with blocks of text in French and Lingala commenting on politics, morality, sex, health and the place of African artists in the world. He came to international attention in Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in 1989, and in 2007 he showed at the Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Kinshasa and Paris.
Samba is prolific and many of his paintings exist in versions, so a work is identified by its title, date and the text he paints on the canvas. The collector Jean Pigozzi built a large collection of his work, and a provenance through his dealers or long-standing collectors is usual.
Kinshasa, Magiciens de la Terre and Venice
His work is in the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Fondation Cartier in Paris has shown him several times.
He was born David Samba and took the name Chéri Samba as a painter.
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