Nú Barreto | Yvanovitch Mbaya: Kimvuka (Together)

26 January - 4 March 2023
Nú Barreto (L) & Yvanovitch Mbaya (R), Installation view, Photo curation, Jeremy Knowles, Courtesy, Ronewa Art Projects, Berlin
Nú Barreto (L) & Yvanovitch Mbaya (R), Installation view, Photo curation, Jeremy Knowles, Courtesy, Ronewa Art Projects, Berlin

Nú Barreto is a multidisciplinary artist whose political practice depicts his own experience of contemporary Africa and the violence and inequality that marks the continent. Barreto has developed his own symbolic system of color and recurring motifs. His canvas paintings are populated by silhouetted anonymous figures flailing against abstracted compositions surrounded by broken ladders to nowhere and signifiers of urban life. Thin wavering “lifelines” dissect his compositions, representing an existence that is precarious yet persistent.

 

Born in 1966 in São Domingos, Guinea-Bissau, Barreto has been living and working in Paris since 1989, graduating from the École Nationale des Métiers de l'Image des Gobelins (Paris, France). In 1998, he represented his country at the Lisbon World Fair (Portugal). His work has since then received international exposure, and Barreto has established himself as one of the most prominent artists of African contemporary art.

 

Yvanovitch Mbaya was born in the Republic of the Congo and now lives and practices in Casablanca, Morocco. His work is enriched by the places he travels, near and far. Through a multidisciplinary practice of drawing, video, installation, and performance, Mbaya works in the manner of a sociologist, studying the social and cultural behaviors of his environment.  

 

Mbaya is particularly interested in the younger generations and their relationship with new tools of communication, which sometimes lead, paradoxically, to the further entrenchment of the individual as a daily actor in an expansive world.   

 

While depicting specific scenes from the artist's memory, the anonymous figures in Mbaya’s drawings are unified within a universal human experience. His earthy materials – coffee, charcoal, indigo – ground them with a common essence. These materials are also a link to place, culture, and history. Influenced by his extensive travels across Africa and his own experience of immigration, Mbaya celebrates difference as well as what connects us.