Notes

Accompanied by a Pavilion 54 certificate of authenticity.

Doudou Mbemba is a Congolese artist who lives and works in Kinshasa. Between 2001 and 2006 he studied art at the l’Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa, which culminated in a Master’s degree. His paintings are energetic and turbulent, investigating themes of identity, migration, and technology. He experiments with different mediums on canvas from oil or acrylic to collage and mixed media.

Mbemba's work is probably an allegory of life at the crossroads of struggles, the denunciation of a society plagued by egocentrism, the illustration of a world where the exception is set up as a rule, where individualism takes precedence over collective interests. Through a warm and garish palette, he castigates social anarchy and the inversion of values through the theme of traffic jams. A committed artist, fervent starter of meritocracy, he wants to champion an artistic philosophy focused on the need to build a world that promotes the participation of everyone in collective happiness, a universe coordinated and ordered, through a new paradigm of living together.

Mbemba’s works have been shown in solo and group shows in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Senegal, South Africa, France, Belgium, and, most recently, in the USA where he participated in Driven to Abstraction (2022) alongside Cameroonian artist Romeo Temwa at Urevbu Contemporary in Memphis, Tennessee.

Provenance

Pavilion 54, Global Digital Platform, 2023.