At the crossroads of science and art, the artist’s creations reveal a universe of abundant imagination, strongly marked by the civil war that ravaged his country between 1991 and 2002.
The exhibition visible at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris until February 20 allows you to discover the work of Abu Bakarr Mansaray, self-taught artist – painter, draftsman and sculptor – born in 1969 in Sierra Leone.
Between craftsmanship and engineering sciences, between Art Brut and Afrofuturism, the universe of Abu Bakarr Mansaray is criss-crossed with oversized aircraft, post-apocalyptic war machines or coming out of hell.
For Gaël Charbau, artistic curator of the exhibition, “much more than a simple motif, the machine is constitutive of modernity in art. Technological upheavals have never ceased to fuel the imagination of artists who have made this machine a myth, sometimes a symbol of a humanity rid of the most thankless tasks and turned towards liberating progress, sometimes, on the contrary, an incarnation of the worst evils. most destructive of our civilization“.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog constituting the first monograph devoted to Abu Bakarr Mansaray, all of whose works come from Jean Pigozzi’s African Art Collection.
The unpublished texts of the authors – André Magnin, gallery owner and expert in modern and contemporary African art, Myriam Odile Blin, sociologist of art, and Gérard Azoulay, head of the CNES Space Observatory – contribute to understanding the springs of a work on the border between dream and reality.