Art movement · DR Congo
Congolese popular painting
Congolese popular painting is the work of largely self-taught artists in Kinshasa who, from the early 1970s, painted the life, humour, politics and history of the city for local buyers. Founded by Chéri Samba, Moké, Chéri Chérin and Pierre Bodo, it borrows from billboards and comics — bold outlines, bright colour and written captions — and became internationally collected from the late 1980s.
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Painters from the street
In the early 1970s, in the city then called Kinshasa, Zaire, a number of painters without academic training began making pictures for ordinary people. Several had worked as sign and billboard painters; they knew how to make an image readable at a glance and how to sell it.
Four names are usually given as the founders: Chéri Samba, Moké, Chéri Chérin and Pierre Bodo. Their pictures hung in homes, bars and barbershops, and in their own studios facing the street.
What it shows
The subjects are the city itself. Bars and dance halls, couples and rivals, money troubles, police, church, sorcery, AIDS, corruption and the politics of Mobutu's Zaire — often treated with irony and humour, sometimes with anger. The paintings are literal and specific: they depict particular people and events and use painted text to name them, explain them or deliver a moral.
Each painter had a distinct voice. Moké recorded the social life of Kinshasa's outdoor bars and streets. Bodo, who became a Pentecostal Christian, painted surreal compositions that warn against sorcery. Samba's comic-strip captions turned his paintings into editorials.
History in pictures
Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, from Lubumbashi in the south-east, painted the history of the Congo in a long series commissioned in the 1970s by the anthropologist Johannes Fabian: more than a hundred paintings covering pre-colonial times, colonial abuses, independence and the conflicts that followed. It is one of the most powerful visual histories of any African country.
From Kinshasa to the world
International exhibitions from 1989 onwards — beginning with Magiciens de la Terre in Paris — brought the painters to museums and collectors abroad. Their success created a market, and with it copies and pastiches.
Related
The Kinshasa painters belong to the same urban culture as Congolese rumba, whose stars and dance halls appear in their pictures. Compare them with the self-taught artists of Nigeria's Oshogbo school, or with Tanzania's Tingatinga painting, another urban style born outside the academy. Before buying a painting attributed to a well-known name, read how to buy African art. For more names, see our lists of Congolese painters and Congolese artists.