Zaire School of Popular Painting

About

In Kinshasa in the 1970s, when Mobutu Sese Seko's government called the country Zaire, self-taught painters who had started out making signs and advertisements began producing bright, narrative canvases. Moke, Chéri Samba, Pierre Bodo and Chéri Chérin were at the centre of this circle, and Samba's brother Cheik Ledy later trained with him.

Look for flat, saturated colour, crisp outlines and speech bubbles or captions in French and Lingala borrowed from comic strips. The subjects come from the news and the street: nightclubs and traffic, fashionable dandies, AIDS, corruption, foreign aid, and the ambitions and humiliations of ordinary people. Samba often paints himself into the picture as a commentator, while Bodo favoured flamboyant, dreamlike figures. International attention grew after the 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre in Paris included Samba and Bodo, and younger painters such as Monsengo Shula carry the tradition forward with images of space travel.