In no particular order, the ANA Team curates a list of artists under 40 years who are changing the game in the art world.
- Michael Armitage
Painting with oil on Lubugo, a native bark cloth from Uganda that is beaten over the course of days to create a natural material with sporadic holes and coarse indents when stretched taut. The use of Lubugo, as the artist has highlighted, is both an effort to identify and disrupt the theme of his works.
Image courtesy of Royal Academy of Arts
Armitage has redesigned the new £1 coin in the UK, it will be in circulation in 2023. He was named a Royal Academician in the discipline of painting by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in January 2022. Armitage divides his time between Nairobi and London.
- Amoako Boafo
Before enrolling at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria for his MFA, Boafo completed his undergraduate studies at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra, Ghana in 2007. In Vienna, Austria, Boafo received the jury prize, the Walter Koschatzky Art Prize in 2017 and the STRABAG Art award International in 2019.
Boafo was the inaugural resident artist at the brand-new Rubell Museum in Miami, Florida, which opened its doors in 2019 and was run by Roberts Projects. Boafo encourages meditation on Black subjectivity, diversity, and complexity by only featuring people from the Diaspora and beyond. To combat portrayal that dehumanizes and objectifies Blackness, his photographs are renowned for their vibrant colors and patterns that exalt his subjects. The artist is launching his residency program dots.atelier, in Accra, Ghana this month.
Image courtesy of artist
- Ibrahim Mahama
His large-scale installations use urban-found objects like jute bags that have been stitched together and draped over architectural elements or scraps of wood. Ibrahim Mahama explores themes including commodities, migration, globalization, and economic exchange through the alteration of materials. Mahama is particularly noted for his technique of covering buildings with used jute sacks that he and a group of collaborators piece together to make patchwork quilts.
In Ghana’s Tamale region, Ibrahim Mahama was born in 1987. He splits his time between Accra, Kumasi, and Tamale. He was one of six artists selected for the 2022 and 2024 commissions for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. In June this year, Mahama was appointed by The International Centre of Graphic Arts, as Artistic Director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2023).
- Thandiwe Muriu
Thandiwe Muriu (b. 1990), is a self-taught photographer from Nairobi, Kenya, where she was born and raised. She has been pursuing photography since a young age and is passionate about working with brands to use photography to communicate so they can keep audiences interested in what they are saying while also eliciting the appropriate response. By embracing the vibrant colors and rich hues that the continent is renowned for, she embraces her African background while addressing significant problems like identity and self-perception in her own work.
By embracing the vibrant colors and rich hues that the continent is renowned for, she embraces her African background while addressing significant problems like identity and self-perception in her own work. Muriu has been featured in Vogue, Forbes, Apple, BBC. Her work is also a part of private and public collections around the world.
- Nengi Omuku
Nengi Omuku (b.1987), earned both her BA and MA from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, has received numerous scholarships and accolades for her artistic work, including the British Council CHOGM art award given by HM Queen Elizabeth II.
She thinks about how people place themselves in relation to other living things on every voyage. Her primary concern is the manner in which the body must adapt in order to fit in. It continuously chooses and gathers its mental, physical, and emotional identity. Nengi Omuku has been given a residence at Black Rock Senegal in 2022 (2022-2023). Omuku lives and works in Lagos, Nigeria.
- Lulama Wolf
Lulama “Wolf” Mlambo (b. 1994), is a visual artist from South Africa, where she resides and works in Johannesburg. While studying fine art and fashion in her first year of college at the University of Johannesburg (2013), she began to develop an expressionist and abstract interest as she got more immersed in her work.
Space, spirituality, and vernacular architectural influences all play a major role in Mlambo’s work. She creates hyper-imagined characters to examine the human condition in incredibly unique ways. curiosity about science in the African context, how the many themes are connected, and what function they provide. Mlambo recently collaborated with South Africa’s largest retailer, Superbalist for a womenswear and homeware line.
Image courtesy of THK Gallery
- Cinga Samson
Born in 1986, Samson was born and grew up in Cape Town where he currently resides and works. Self-taught, he discovered painting after enrolling in a cooperative artist studio. The symbols the artist uses in the compositions are frequently obliquely reflective of current themes.
Samson’s quest for beauty lies at the heart of his creations. The paintings combine realistic characters and objects inside surroundings that appear softened and more elusive. They are typically set at a shadowless, crepuscular time of day, evoking pre-dawn or dusk. However, he creates his visuals not only to seduce but also to warn the observer of its own presence.
- Sungi Mlengeya
The Dar es Salaam-born (b. 1991) artist aims to commemorate the ladies in her life by using minimalism and monochromatic color schemes, analyzing every lived moment she experienced with them, and exposing the tremendous roles these women played in the development of their communities. In Mlengeya’s photographs, ladies are frequently in motion while striking acrobatic stances.
Image courtesy of the artist
Mlengeya is a self-taught artist who typically uses acrylic on canvas to create free-form, simplistic paintings with an intriguing use of blank space. The majority of the pieces are memorials to the ladies who surround her and feature dark figures in muted tones of black and brown against flawless white backdrops. (Un)Choreographed, was a solo exhibition that marked the reopening of the London Africa Centre’s residence in June 2022.
- Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, aka Aboudia
Aboudia, who rose to fame in the world because to his moving depictions of the war for Abidjan, loves to think of himself as a cosmopolitan artist who travels constantly to different locations and societies. Aboudia was born in 1983 and earned a degree from the CTAA (Technological Centre of Applied Arts) in Bingerville.
Image courtesy of Jack Bell Gallery
Aboudia learned his style from living it on the streets. In opposition to the predictions of his parents and professors, who thought he would become a tag artist, he decided to pursue a career as a painter. The artist collaborated with phillips auction house, Different Throws of Dreams: Aboudia x Dubuffet. In August this year
- Ken Nwadiogbu
Nwadiogbu is a multi-talented self-taught artist located in Lagos, Nigeria. Being an educated civil engineer, he quickly changed his focus to fine art, embracing hyperrealism and charcoal drawing at first before broadening his artistic scope to include more conceptual works and a wider range of methods, such as acrylic painting, sculpture, and installation.
Image courtesy of Artsy
Nwadiogbu likes to broaden his and our perspectives. He almost never does anything by accident; instead, he acts with enthusiasm and deliberate consideration. By contesting Black representational practices, he continually revitalizes his practice. His artistic output extends beyond traditional painting to include more contemporary mediums including photography, sculpture, installation, and video. His work has been featured in CNN, BBC and is part of private collections of artists like Swizz Beats,
