
Helene Love-Allotey
Head of Department
US$25,000 - US$35,000
Our African Modern & Contemporary Art specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.
Find your local specialistHead of Department
Chéri Samba was born in 1956 in the small village of Kinto M'Vuila, in Lower Congo. His natural facility for drawing and caricature was revealed early on; inspired by the cartoons in the magazine Jeunes pour Jeunes, he began to make sketches of classmates and family members. At sixteen, Samba left school and traveled to Kinshasa to find work. Drawing on his artistic abilities, he soon found employment in the Mbuta-Masunda Studio of sign-painters. His bright, eye-catching advertisements were well-received by the city's inhabitants. In 1975, he was commissioned to illustrate the cartoon, 'Lolo m'a decu', in the entertainment publication Bilenge Info. The success of these drawings enabled Samba to open his own studio.
Inspired by his experiences in the advertising studio, Samba began to incorporate text in his paintings:
"I had noticed that people in the street would walk by paintings, glance at them and keep going. I thought that if I added a bit of text, people would have to stop and take time to read it, to get more into the painting and admire it. That's what I called the 'Samba signature'." (Cheri Samba)
In this way, the artist was able to set himself apart from his peers, pioneering a style that would become known as Zairian Popular Painting. For Samba, art should be accessible and easy to relate to; paintings of the people, for the people. His scenes are often satirical in tone, criticizing social inequality, corruption, greed, and poor education in Kinshasa.
In regards to the present lot, je suis un rebelle Cheri Samba remarked that he "wanted to remind people that so far nothing has changed. You still have the dominated and the dominant. We pretend to fight terrorism, but it's still there. Rebels are traitors who manipulate and harm people. It is basically a power struggle and I'm not only talking about Congo. I had a problem once, because of a painting where somebody thought I had portrayed them. So they hassled me. Although I am not the type of rebel I just described, I chose to use myself as a model to avoid running the same risk again."
Bibliography
A. Magnin ed., J'aime Cheri Samba, (Paris, 2004), pp.11-15, 104.