On Wednesday, May 11, PIASA will hold an auction entitled Africa + Modern and Contemporary Art. Featuring 68 lots, this sale includes a major work by the artist N'Guessan Kra.
A major figure of the Vohou Vohou group, the Ivorian artist N'Guessan Kra trained successively at the School of Fine Arts in Abidjan and then in Paris, graduating from the painting section in 1980. In the following years, he contributed to further strengthening the foundations of the Vohou-Vohou group alongside Youssouf Bath, Théodore Koudougnon and Yacouba Touré, until 1991, and developed with them a working method anchored in the tradition of ancestral aesthetics based not only on the use of raw materials - earth, sand, tree bark, animal skins, bones, fish bones, fabrics... but also the drawing of meaningful signs such as hieroglyphs or goldweights. Transformed and assembled, the collected objects are diverted from their original purpose to serve the Vohou philosophy and thus create a new plastic language.
Invited to participate in the contemporary art exhibition organized alongside the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988, N'Guessan Kra is represented in the collections of the important MMCA National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in Seoul (Korea). We present here, a work similar to the one in the MMCA collection, dated 1984.
Kra N'Guessan
Mémoire du Temps (Memory of time), 1995
Estimated: 20 000 / 30 000 €
Asian interest in the artist's work continues in the years that follow, and in 1995, a major work by the artist, Memory of Time, which we also present here, is exhibited at the initiative of the Setagaya Museum of Art in several museums in Japan, from Tokyo to Gifu, as part of the exhibition "An Inside Story: African Art of our time.” Memory of Time is a perfect illustration of the philosophy of the Vohou group, and bears witness to the interest of Asian art lovers for the most avant-garde artists of the continent as early as the late 1980s. Dating from 1995 - the period of the artist's first years in Paris - it is a tribute to the passing of time, and relies on ancestral techniques of coloring through the use of natural pigments. The freshness of these colors gifted from nature remains intact even today.
