Among the artists highlighted by the sale of PIASA's contemporary African art department on Thursday, November 7, 2019, Ibou Diouf was the witness and one of the key players in the emergence of an independent Senegalese art scene.
In 1960, at the age of 19, Ibou Diouf joined the School of Fine Arts that Senegal, recently independent, has just inaugurated. Six years later, the first World Festival of Negro Arts notices his works and uses one for his poster. The artist draws the attention of the writer Léopold Sédar Senghor.
In addition to his painting, Ibou Diouf worked as a bookkeeper for the Thiès Tapestry Manufacture and later costume designer and theater designer, notably for the Daniel Sorano National Theater in Dakar.
The artist bypasses the fatal pitfall of falling into an official art. Despite some eclipses, the work of Ibou Diouf has never ceased to be appreciated in Senegal and beyond national borders until his death occurred in Dakar on June 8, 2017.
Ibou Diouf (1953-2017, Sénégal) Marone la poétesse
Estimate : 3000 / 5000 €
The work entitled Marone the poetess offered for sale by PIASA is a tribute to Marone Ndiaye that Léopold Sédar Senghor considered as one of his masters in poetry. Author of over two thousand poems, she was originally from the village of Joal, like the academician who was born there in 1906.
Fine volutes of smoke escape from the pipe that the poet, here represented in profile, seems to pinch the tip of her lips. On a relatively neutral background, his garment is the pretext for the artist to deploy his colour palette until dizziness. The presence, discreet but noticeable, of its red iris, would summon the almost magical dimension of poetry when it is declaimed.
This is a very large format measuring nearly two meters in height and mixing with great subtlety oil to acrylic.
