Ouattara Watts

Biography

In January 1988, at the opening of an exhibition at the Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris, Jean-Michel Basquiat came up to a young artist from Abidjan. He liked Watts’s work and persuaded him to come to New York.

Watts moved there the same year and still lives in New York.

He was born on 27 May 1957 in Abidjan and was given the name Bakari Ouattara at birth; the name Ouattara Watts appeared only after his move to the United States. His father was a surgeon and also an African spiritual healer, and the family followed a syncretic faith that combined Christianity, Judaism, Islam and local West African beliefs. At home they spoke French and Bambara. He began to draw at seven: according to some accounts, his first drawings were made for his spiritual initiation ceremony. He left school at sixteen, which disappointed his family, who had expected a career in medicine; his father, however, did not stand in his way. Watts learned about art from books at the French cultural centre in Abidjan and fell in love with Picasso and Modigliani.

In 1977, aged nineteen, he came to Paris and enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He also studied with Jacques Yankel, a French painter who taught students from Abidjan. In the Paris museums he saw for the first time the originals of Picasso, Miró, Brancusi and Duchamp, which he had known only from reproductions, and this is believed to have left a strong mark on his early work. He long considered his own pieces unfinished and was in no hurry to show them. Later he said that he needed to make a synthesis of everything he had learned in Africa and everything he was learning in the West. Finding a gallery after his studies proved hard: according to some accounts, French curators turned him down, saying they knew nothing about African art. One of the first collectors who helped him get by is said to have been Claude Picasso, Pablo’s son.

He began showing his work in 1985, and in 1986 his first solo exhibition took place at the Centre Culturel de la Rochelle. After New York came solo shows at the Akira Ikeda Gallery in Nagoya (1990), Vrej Baghoomian’s gallery in New York (1992), the Berkeley Art Museum (1994), the Gagosian Gallery (1995) and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City (1996). In 2004 the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College presented “Crossing Currents: The Synergy of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ouattara Watts”. There were also exhibitions in Rome, Milan, Paris and Abidjan, and in 2019 at the Paul Rebeyrolle Museum in Limoges.

Group shows brought him into an international context: “African Explores” at the New Museum in New York (1991), the Venice Biennale (1993), “Black President”, on Fela Kuti (2003), and in 2002 three at once: Documenta 11 in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial and “The Short Century”, on the independence and liberation movements in Africa. The Beijing Biennale of 2005 is also mentioned.

At the core of his paintings are large abstract compositions that combine found objects, photographs, paint, signs and numerical equations. He uses photographs of West African spiritual symbols and pop-culture figures, setting technology beside the long established. His painting is often placed within Neo-Expressionism; his interest in numerical mysticism is linked to mythological traditions shared by Africa and the West, and among the sources of his imagery the cosmology of the Senufo and the Dogon is named. I think his own phrase explains these works better than the critics do: “I am painting the Cosmos.”