The Africa Centre & the Sulger-Buel Lovell gallery present the exhibition 53 Echoes of Zaire: Popular Painting from Lubumbashi, DRC, which will take place at the Sulger-Buel Lovell gallery, London, until 30th June.

The exhibition will be curated by Salimata Diop, Head of Programme at the Africa Centre, London. It will unveil a collection of fifty three works acquired by the late Prof. Victor Bol, all originating from the early 1970s’Lubumbashi, created by five artists from DRC: T. Kalema, C. Mutombo, B. Ilunga, Ndaie, and Tshibumba Kanda Matulu.

The latter, author of over thirty of the works featured, thought of himself as a historian as well as an artist. Born in 1947 in Lubumbashi in the very south of what was then Belgian Congo, his wish was to become a teacher, but he eventually had to find another way of teaching history to his fellow countrymen. In the mid-1960s Tshibumba Kanda Matulu started training himself to paint and practiced painting as a profession from 1969. He became the main figure of an artistic movement where artists articulated a system of shared memories. Recalling ancestral origins, colonial history, the fight for independence, post-colonial struggles for power, they created artworks for local people to be bought by local people.

The collection is notable for its consistency, quality and contribution to the history of Popular Painting in the urban and industrial Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is accompanied by contemporary documentation and original photography featuring the principal artist in the collection, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu.

Many of the works have been included in significant international exhibitions – for instance : A Congo Chronicle: Patrice Lumumba in Urban Art, Museum for African Art, New-York, 1999-2009- or publications –such as: -60 ans de Peinture au Zaïre, Joseph-Aurélien Cornet, Remi De Cnodder, Ivan Dierickx, Wim Toebosch, Bruxelles: Les Editeurs d’Art Associés, 1989.

www.sulger-buel-lovell.com