Abdoulaye Diarrassouba "Aboudia"

(Ivorian, born 1983)

Untitled, 2016

Footnotes

Provenance
The artist's studio, Brooklyn, NY;
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2016.

Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, known as Aboudia, stands at the forefront of the landscape of contemporary art with his energetic paintings rendered in oil stick and acrylic. Born in Abidjan, the major urban centre of Côte d'Ivoire, Aboudia trained at the School of Applied Art in Bingerville before graduating from the Abidjan Institut des Arts in 2005. Aboudia recognises the influence of his experience growing up in Abidjan as central to his artistic practice. His canvases and works on paper fuse imagery drawn from the local street culture of his hometown with traditional West-African sculpture and voodoo iconography. Lines of brightly coloured oil stick articulate figures, traffic and animals atop ghostly passages of semi-opaque acrylic paint that, in places, reveal the layers of newspaper pages, magazine cut-outs, and educational materials typically pasted beneath.

The gestural application of pigment and large-scale format favoured by the artist recall both the graffiti murals of Abidjan and the avant-garde formalist experimentations of artists central to the Western canon such as Cy Twombly, whose work Aboudia had greatly admired when visiting the permanent collection at the Tate Modern, London. Recognising the fusion of diverse cultural and artistic references in his work, Aboudia names his stylistic approach Nouchi – a term more typically used to describe the colloquial language spoken in urban Abidjan which blends several Ivorian languages with French.

Now working between his studios in Abidjan and Brooklyn, Aboudia employs his artmaking as a vehicle to convey the experiences of the Ivorian youth following the violence of the 2011 civil war. 'As an artist, my contribution is to tell our story for the next generation. Writers will write, singers will sing. I paint' (Aboudia quoted in O'Reilly, 2011). He conceives of the figures that populate his work as representative of this next generation of children who he believes to be central to the future success of the country.

Aboudia has achieved global appeal through his kinetic canvases bursting with colour. Since 2007 the artist's work has been widely exhibited in international solo and group exhibitions and is held in major collections including that of the Saatchi Gallery (London), the Nevada Museum of Art (USA), and the Jean Pigozzi Collection of African Art.

Bibliography
Finbarr O'Reilly, 'Ivorian artist paints as bullets whizz overhead', Reuters, 29 April 2011, online.