FIRST FLOOR GALLERY HARARE BOUVY ENKOBO. Sois Prudent/Take Care (La vie dans la ville/life in the city)

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1 FIRST FLOOR GALLERY HARARE BOUVY ENKOBO Sois Prudent/Take Care (La vie dans la ville/life in the city)

2 Sois Prudent/Take Care (La vie dans la ville/life in the city) Bouvy Enkobo The attention of international art market has been a mixed blessing for African artists. While attention and support are long overdue and are welcome, they also come with subtle and unsubtle suggestions and persuasions as to what kind of work African artists should be making and what kind of things they should be talking about. And yet, a Western collector cannot know the genuine day to day concerns of African artists and things they feel responsible to speak to in their environment and things they want to explore, whether or not they tick the boxes of the current fashionable intellectual concerns. This exhibition is exactly that an artist making a space for himself to speak sincerely about things he knows well and things close to and urgently important to him the life of an African city, Kinshasa and his chosen medium, painting. The title speaks equally to both the syncopated precariousness of life in the city, where speed of life is marked by immediacy and unpredictability survival is the polar opposite of pause and repose required for reflection. Like city life is a survival terrain to be navigated at one s own hazard, so is painting. Painting is its own country, with a language and infrastructure, rules and premises, which are both, to be obeyed, pushed, bent and broken by those who are brave enough and know the risks. In Sois Prudent Bouvy Enkobo is equally the subject and observer as a city dweller pushing through each day of urban life, filled with competition for space to live, to be heard and to be seen and as a painter, solving the live dynamics of each painting, with programmed and unpredictable outcomes, colours and forms competing for attention, cacophonies requiring harmonization. The result is a symphonic celebration of colour and form, underscored however by a subtle and sometimes unsubtle yearning for quietude and a chance to find a place where life feels less like a high wire act. Valerie Kabov Curator

3 Bouvy Enkobo Born in Kinshasa in 1981 Lives and works in Kinshasa For Enkobo art became a vocation from childhood. At the age of 15 he enrolled at the Institute des Beaux-arts de Kinshasa, specialising in painting, which remains his primary discipline and dedication despite exploration and studies in a range of other media from photography to animation. Quite early on Bouvy has decided to take time in forging his own path, ideas and style, away from the highly figurative and decorative Congolese style popularised by the likes of Cheri Samba. In doing so he found himself wanting to speak about the life of Kinshasa, beyond specific personalities, which inhabit it but rather as an emotional landscape at the heart of his country s difficult contemporary history. In his work waves of colour and form document the emotions, pathos and rhythms of the city, in the way that music can and does. Enkobo has exhibited widely in DRC and Belgium, taking part Maendelo exhibition in at the Walloon Parliament and Walloon Contemporary Art Centre in 2013 in Brussels and becoming the winner of the European Union special prize at Yango Biennale in Kinshasa in His work is found in numerous international private collections, as well as part of the collection of the Delegation of the European Union in DRC and Fondation Hirondelle. Sois Prudent, On a Sunny Day, cm x 125cm Oil and acrylic on canvas

4 Sois Prudent Personal Scale, cm x 183cm Collage, Oil and acrylic on canvas

5 Sois Prudent Rush hour Part 2, cm x 183cm Oil and acrylic on canvas

6 Sois Prudent -Life in the City, cm x 205cm Collage, Oil and acrylic on canvas

7 Sois Prudent Rush hour Part 1, cm x 150cm Oil and acrylic on canvas

8 Sois Prudent, Beyond Rooftops, cm x 125cm Oil and acrylic on canvas

9 Sois Prudent City Postcard A and B, cm x 42cm Collage and acrylic on paper

10 Sois Prudent City Postcard C, cm x 59cm Collage and acrylic on paper Sois Prudent City Postcard D, cm x 59cm Acrylic on paper

11 First Floor Gallery Harare 31 Lyric Heights, 149 Samora Machel Avenue Harare Zimbabwe First Floor Gallery Harare 2017