Ouattara Watts

Ouattara Watts ( born 1957 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire) is an Ivorian neo- expressionist painter who lives in New York.

Life and work

Watts in 1957, born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he spent his youth. His father was trained as a western surgeon and practiced at the same time traditional African healing methods of the Senufo. His family said the official language French and Bambara, a Mande the associated language.

With sixteen Watts finished his schooling and thus disappoint his family, who expected a career in medicine from him. His father let him go his way as a painter. In this phase, Watts made ​​in the French Cultural acquaintance with literature on Western artists such as Picasso. At nineteen, Watts took his studies at the École nationale supérieure des beaux -arts de Paris, Paris. Besides his studies he attended the Paris museums, where he got to see originals by Picasso, Miró, Brancusi and Duchamp, whom he knew only as reproductions to the time and who had a decisive influence on his early work. He delayed his own works to show at exhibitions, since he does not yet held ready for. In the course of time, the neo- expressionist paintings of the 80s ( Cucchi, Schnabel, Basquiat and Penck ) became an important formal basis for Watts painting.

" I needed to make a synthesis of everything I had learned in Africa and did everything I was learning in the West, I had to assimilate it all ( ... ) My vision is not based only on a country or a continent; it's beyond geography, or what is seen on a map. Even though I localize it to make it better Understood, it is contrary than that. It Refers To the cosmos "

The arc of his African origin for Western art he struck through mythology (eg Zahlenmystizismus ) that exist in both cultures. He is concerned about the metaphysical relationship of man and the environment and tries Occult and rational, Africa and the West to join this world and the hereafter in his painting. As the son of a medicine man, who was also in the western surgery at home, this need arose early in his childhood. Through his emigration to Paris and later New York Watts was a cosmopolitan who can draw in his painting on all kinds of sources of inspiration. Enigmatic operations, intricate plants, chimerical nature and cryptic characters are shown atmospherically dense on his part very large -scale works.

Exhibitions (selection)

Solo Exhibitions

  • 2008 Outlaw - Magazzino d' Arte Moderna Rome
  • 2005 Ouattara Watts - MAM Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Salzburg, Salzburg

Group Exhibitions

  • 2007 Crossing Currents - The Synergy of Jean -Michel Basquiat and Ouattara Watts, Hood Museum of Art Hanover, New Hampshire
  • 2003 Black President - The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo - Kuti New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City, USA
  • 2002 Documenta 11, Kassel
  • 2002 Whitney Biennial, New York
  • 1993 45.Biennale of Venice, Venice, Italy
  • 1991 Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen
  • MoMA PS1 in 1991 Queens, New York,
Neo-expressionism Senufo people Marcel Duchamp Enzo Cucchi Hanover (New Hampshire)
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