Chéri Samba

Biography

At first his name was David Samba. Christian names were then banned in the country, and he took a long African name, Samba wa Mbimba N'zingo Nuni Masi Ndo Mbasi. For his work he wanted to sign himself “Dessinateur Samba”, that is, “Samba the Draughtsman”, but the public already knew him as Chéri Samba, and that name stuck. In Kikongo the surname means both “prayer” and “a judgement on you”.

He was born on 30 December 1956 in the village of Kinto-M'Vuila, in what was then the Belgian Congo. He drew constantly, all through his school years. He did well at school, almost always second in his class, but in his third year of secondary school he gave up his studies.

In 1972 the sixteen-year-old Samba went to Kinshasa, the capital of what was then Zaire, to look for work as a sign painter. There he met the painters Moké and Bodo. With them and his younger brother Cheik Ledy, a circle took shape that became one of the most prominent schools of so-called popular painting in the country.

In 1975 he opened his own studio and at the same time began drawing for the entertainment magazine Bilenge Info. Billboards and comics taught him two things, and he carried both into his painting, which he was then doing on sacking. From the billboards came large forms and bright colour, from the comics the speech bubbles. Besides the characters' lines, he put his own comments into them, so that the picture at once tells a story and argues with the viewer. The texts are almost always in French and Lingala. The artist usually places himself at the centre of these scenes. His themes are poverty, corruption, the chaos of the big city, and stupidity, including that of his own culture. He explained that he was appealing to people's consciences and painting reality, even shocking reality, and that humour and colour were there to make a person stop and look. To my mind, that recipe is where his strength lies: first it is funny, then it is uncomfortable.

In Kinshasa he quickly became known. In 1979 his works were shown in West Berlin in the exhibition Modern Art from Africa, part of the programme of the first Horizonte festival of world cultures.

In 1982 Mwezé Ngangura's documentary Kin Kiesse, about life in Kinshasa, was released, with Samba as its main narrator. The director recalled that it was the artist who helped him convince the French Ministry of Cooperation, the France 2 channel and Congolese television that a film about Kinshasa was worth making.

The international breakthrough came in 1989 with the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. A year later he received a residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, and Paris has been his second home ever since. In 1991 a catalogue of his retrospective came out, prepared by the museum of modern art in Ostend and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and in 2004 the Fondation Cartier published the book J'aime Chéri Samba (I Love Chéri Samba), with texts by André Magnin and Robert Storr. His painting J'aime la couleur (I Love Colour) deals with race and with how Africans in different countries keep a shared identity. In 2007 the British magazine Art Review called him “the Congolese Hogarth”.

That same year, 2007, Robert Storr invited him to the 52nd Venice Biennale, to the main exhibition Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense. Samba's works are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a large number of them are in Jean Pigozzi's collection of contemporary African art. The artist lives and works by turns in Kinshasa and Paris.