As part of the sale devoted to Modern and Contemporary African Art on Wednesday, June 24, 2020, PIASA, in partnership with the South African auction house Aspire Auction, is offering to collectors two works by the Ugandan painter Joseph Ntensibe.
The artist was born in 1953 in Masaka, a predominantly rural region bordered to the east by Lake Victoria. Joseph Ntensibe was awarded an art scholarship to the School of Fine Arts at Makerere University, while his first works began to be exhibited in the mid-1970s, notably at the Mount Kenya Art Gallery in neighbouring Kenya.
Today, Joseph Ntensibe's paintings are highly prized by French and international collectors, so much so that it is not uncommon for these works to sell at auction for more than 150,000 euros, as was the case on November 7, 2019 during an auction organized by PIASA auction house.
Although the two paintings offered for sale on Wednesday, June 24, 2020 reflect two very distinct styles, they nevertheless bear witness to the omnipresence of one theme: that of nature. Joseph Ntensibe spends the first years of his life in a rural region, largely covered with forest. This face-to-face encounter with trees and vegetation offered him, from his earliest works, an inexhaustible repertoire of motifs.
Joseph Ntensibe (born 1953, Uganda)
Untitled, 2010
Oil and oil pastels on canvas
Signed and dated on the bottom center
118 x 167 cm
In the painting "Untitled", created in 2010 in oil and pastel, the artist depicts a landscape devoid of any human presence. Articulated around a central path, the work is the scene of a chromatic deployment that allows its author to express the infinite nuances caused by natural light.
Joseph Ntensibe (born 1953, Uganda)
Tropical garden 4, 2019
Oil on canvas
Signed and dated on the bottom center
150 x 200 cm
More recently, the work "Tropical garden 4", painted in 2019, demonstrates the artist's capacity for abstraction. The atmosphere is covered with a dreamlike and fantastic veil under which the forms of nature seem to take their autonomy. The colour contrasts here are much more marked.
Much more than a simple frame to the scenes that the artist depicts, the omnipresent nature is an effective means to address environmental issues that cross not only Uganda but also the entire African continent: deforestation, drought, climate change. Joseph Ntensibe's work is a hymn to the beauty of the world but also to its fragility.
