BETWEEN DROP AND SEED

Familiar with the incomprehensible, the inexpressible, the acts of stirring and healing, his works are places of power.

Aliou Diack brings together nature, tradition, spirituality and avant-garde aesthetics.

His artistic process begins by taking canvases into forests, jungles, meadows and fields and laying them there. Over time, leaves, blossoms, seeds, feathers, sun, wind and rain leave their mark. Like a sower, he adds colour pigments, earth and other organic fibres in rhythmic movements.

Outdoors or later in the studio, he ‘ploughs’ and ‘pricks’ the canvases with branches and sticks and ‘soaks’ them with further colour pigments. With brush and pastel chalks, he finally draws forth lines, ambiguous beings and mysterious structures from the thicket of colours, interconnected in a state of suspended metamorphosis.

The pigments used by Aliou Diack are extracted from grasses, shrubs and trees considered sacred by traditional shamans.

The production of these colour pigments – whether for medicinal or artistic purposes – is a source of income for people in his homeland of Senegal and is financially supported by the artist and the gallery.

Alongside his large-scale works on canvas, we are exhibiting a selection of his watercolour drawings, which are characterised by a lightness of touch, humour and a sensitive insight into human nature.

Aliou Diack was born in 1987 in a village on the edge of the jungle in Sidi Bougou, in the Mbour region of Dakar, Senegal. At the age of ten, he moved to the urban heart of Dakar. He compensated for the precarious conditions and lack of nature by sketching the proportions, colours and textures of flora and fauna he could see.

These sketchbooks caused a stir and ultimately enabled him to study art at the Ecole Nationale des Arts de Dakar.

The list of venues where the artist has exhibited to date is impressive. After ambitious exhibitions in Dakar and Lagos, he held a solo exhibition 2022 at Art Basel.

Since then, he has exhibited at famous museums and art fairs in Paris, Dakar, Seoul, London, Madrid, Tokyo and Berlin (Neue Nationalgalerie).

For this solo exhibition he creates a complete new series.