LEBASQUIAT ART GALLERY

Why Basquiat? Because, as the founder of the eponymous gallery explains, he is the most highly rated Afro-American artist in the world. Artist who also had a special bond with the Ivory Coast, particularly through his friendship with Ouattara Watts, an Ivorian painter now living in New York. Basquiat came to Abidjan in 1986 for an exhibition of his works at the French Cultural Center, when he was already a star of the New York underground, and visited Korhogo, the Senoufo capital, a land of animist beliefs and craftsmen who strongly inspired him.
Inaugurated in May 2014 with an exhibition bringing together four leading figures from the Ivorian artistic world (architect and designer Issa Diabaté, photographer Ananias Leki Dago and painters Aboudia and Armand Boua), the Basquiat is the project of a certain Jacobleu. A multidisciplinary and prolific artist-plastician who handles the pen, the brush and the lens with the same ease. This free electron wanted to create a space of proximity with the public and to support cultural initiatives.

The Basquat Art Gallery has three exhibition rooms, a multi-purpose room for cultural expression, and an arty café that can host conferences, debates, dedications, film screenings, performances and installations. The particularity of the art gallery is that it functions as an association working to promote all forms of expression, whether literary, plastic, visual or scenic. In its streamlined and minimalist space there are on average three major exhibitions per year of artists. Another distinctive sign: in recent years, this gallery has positioned itself as a place for the promotion of an art form exploiting the digital or digital aspect. Jacobleu is also at the origin of an unprecedented event in sub-Saharan Africa: the first edition of the Rencontres internationales des arts numériques (RIANA), an artistic, cultural and technological happening that took place in 2017 at the Institut français de Côte d'Ivoire.
In 2020, the gallery hosted the international meeting of visual and digital arts in Abidjan and talented Ivorian artists such as recently Issa Ouattara (Ivorian artist sculptor and designer), Vanly Tiéné, from the fine arts who makes beautiful driftwood sculptures, the painter Yubah Sanogo, the visual artist Wanoumi Aziema and of course the paintings of Jacobleu himself. We like: the simplicity and philosophy of the gallery, desacralizing contemporary art.