Painter · DR Congo
Chéri Samba
Chéri Samba is a Congolese painter, born in 1956, who began as a sign painter in Kinshasa and became one of the best-known African artists of his generation. His bright, comic-strip-like paintings carry text in French and Lingala and comment, with humour, on politics, money, sex, health and the art world itself.
Updated 3 min read
From billboards to canvas
Chéri Samba was born in 1956 in Kinto M'Vuila, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1972, aged about sixteen, he left school to apprentice with the sign painters of Kasa-Vubu Avenue in Kinshasa, painting shop signs and advertising. In 1975 he borrowed the speech balloon from comic strips, which let him add both story and comment to his pictures. Around 1979 he turned to his own paintings full-time.
The training shaped everything that followed. His pictures are made to be read quickly from across a street: bold outlines, flat bright colour, and blocks of text that tell you what you are looking at and what to think about it.
Painting that talks
Text is Samba's signature. Captions, speech balloons and long explanatory paragraphs in French and Lingala sit inside the picture, so a painting can be a joke, an editorial and a moral lesson at once. From the late 1980s he himself became the main subject of his paintings. Subjects range from Kinshasa street life and relationships to AIDS prevention, corruption, migration and the global art market. He often paints himself into the scene, as witness, commentator or target.
How to look at a Samba: read the text first, as he intends, then look at who is speaking and who is being spoken about. The characters usually have a clear role, such as the narrator, the victim or the fool, and the artist often appears as one of them. The pictures are built like a page of a newspaper, with a headline, a story and a moral. This reading is the site's own.
The Kinshasa popular painters
Samba is one of the founding figures of what is called Congolese popular painting, a movement of largely self-taught Kinshasa artists — among them Moké, Chéri Chérin and Pierre Bodo — who from the 1970s painted the city's life, scandals and history for local buyers, in a style that owed more to advertising and comics than to art school.
International career
Samba's international breakthrough came with Magiciens de la Terre, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1989. The Fondation Cartier in Paris became a long-term supporter: it invited him for a residency in 1990 and in 2004 gave him his first solo exhibition there, J'aime Chéri Samba, with thirty-five paintings. His work is held by the Centre Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among other collections.
In 1997 he completed Quel avenir pour notre art ?, a large triptych in which he and Picasso each carry a painting into the Centre Pompidou; Picasso is displayed in the museum while Samba leaves with his canvas. It is usually read as a comment, with humour, on how the art world treats African artists. The Musée Maillol in Paris showed panels from it in 2023–24, in what was billed as the first retrospective of his work, covering forty years.
Where to see the work
The Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art and the Fondation Cartier hold his work, and the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town lists him among its artists; ask each which paintings are on view. The Musée Maillol show has closed.
Why he matters
Samba proved that a painter trained on the street could talk to the world without changing his language. His mix of image and text speaks to the same Kinshasa audiences as Congolese rumba, the city's other great popular art. His fellow founder of Kinshasa popular painting Chéri Chérin took a more satirical line; see our list of Congolese painters. Compare his public, outdoor ambitions with the monumental sculpture of Ousmane Sow, exhibited on a Paris bridge in 1999.
