A leading figure in the art and music scene of the Ivory Coast, Turay Mederic fuses aspects of neo-Expressionism, tribal art and graffiti in his vibrant, collaged and painted works. Fascinated from an early age by artists such as Picasso, Dalí and Basquiat, he has developed a cross-disciplinary style that he refers to as sculpeinture, bringing aspects of painting and sculpture together. He uses a wide range of media, and has even been known to paint using a glaze made from coffee, a major export of his country. A former nominee for Best Rap Artist at the Ivory Coast MTV Music Awards, he is concerned with telling the story of Africa through a distinctly modern idiom. ‘I have those two combinations of cultures struggling in my soul’, he says. ‘I think my paintings reflect that because you can see something very African in them, but also a very contemporary style, like street art’. The expressive, grimacing heads in the two present works are painted in vivid acrylic hues upon a lively newsprint collage of text and image, speaking of the energetic chaos of the urban environment; the faces recall African masks as much as the works of Picasso and Basquiat that were inspired by them, highlighting a complex circularity of artistic influence from Africa to the West and back again.
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