Chéri Chérin

Chéri Chérin was born Joseph Kinkonda on 16 February 1955 in Léopoldville, as Kinshasa was then called. He studied at the city's Académie des Beaux-Arts, where he took ceramics, then worked on commercial signs and murals in the N'Djili district and, like other painters of his generation, worked above all for local buyers, painting pictures that hung in homes, bars and shops. From the 1970s he became one of the leading names of Congolese popular painting, the movement of Kinshasa painters who told the story of their city in bright, readable images with written captions.

Chérin's work is political and satirical. He painted the decline of Mobutu's Zaire, the wars and the refugees, power, money and corruption, but also the dreams of ordinary Kinois — the bars, the music, the fashion, the hope of leaving for Europe. His compositions are crowded and theatrical, combining realistic detail with caricature, and his captions, often in French or Lingala, act like a newspaper editorial.

His paintings were shown in Europe, in group exhibitions including Congo Art Works at Bozar in Brussels (2016–17), Congo Stars in Tübingen and Graz (2018–19) and Congo Paintings in Vichy (2019), and the Weltmuseum Wien holds several 1999 paintings, among them Death of the State of Zaire, If I Was President … or King of the Animals, Les réfugiés de Brazzaville and Catastrophe de Ndolo (Wapi Mama). He also trained younger artists such as JP Mika, who paid him homage in 2019. He died on 19 October 2025.

How to look at a Chérin: read the caption as a headline and the picture as the story under it, and watch for the point where realism tips into caricature; the satire usually lives in that gap. That reading is this site's own.

Where to see the work

The Weltmuseum Wien shows its Chérin paintings online, the Magnin-A gallery in Paris lists him among its artists, and Google Arts & Culture shows works such as In the Great Zaïre Forest. See Chéri Samba and our lists of Congolese painters and Congolese artists.