"Beware of those who demand from you to be African before being a painter or a sculptor, of those who, in the name of an authenticity that remains to be defined, continue to want to keep us in an exotic garden."
- Iba N'diaye in Cahiers de la Maison de la culture de Reims, 1978 in Iba N'diaye: L'Oeuvre de modernité, Dak' Art Biennale of contemporary art, Senegal, 2000
This ink on paper executed by the painter Iba Ndiaye in 1976 tackles a theme privileged by the artist who will, throughout his career, represent jazz bands in skillful compositions where the viewer can feel the movement, rhythms and the energy of the concerts coming to life. On a formal level, Ndiaye found, through the wash drawing in which he excelled, various means of transposing onto a flat surface the illusionist notion of three-dimensional sculpture studied during his early years in Paris. One can easily imagine, at the sight of the drawing, the atmosphere of the Parisian jazz clubs that he used to frequent and their atmosphere, which he transcribes here with great sensibility.
Iba N'Diaye (1928-2008, Senegal)
Untitled (Jazz), 1976
Estimate: 10000 / 15000 €
A leading figure of the art of independent Senegal, Iba N'diaye moved to France in 1948 to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. At the School of Fine Arts in Dakar from 1959, where he returns at the invitation of President Léopold Sédar Senghor, he creates a department of Visual Arts that he directs until 1967. Working alongside the painter Papa Ibra Tall and, under the impetus of the president-poet, Iba N’diaye prepares the exhibition of the first International Festival of Black Arts in 1966 and shows his work alongside Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso and Pierre Soulages in the inaugural exhibition of the Musée Dynamique in Dakar.
A cosmopolitan figure of African art before its time, the artist will take part in numerous exhibitions on several continents: Brazil, Japan, Korea, the United States, France, Germany, Sweden, Finland and, of course, in Senegal, Algeria, Mali... He is shown at the 8th Biennial of Arts of São Paolo in 1965, the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966, the first Pan-African Festival of Algiers in 1969. In Paris, his work is shown in the exhibition Art Sénégalais d'aujourd'hui, a landmark celebration of Senegalese art held at the Grand Palais in 1974 and, in 1981, his works are exhibited in New York. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition Iba N'diaye: Evolution of a Style, focused on the theme of jazz, contains a preface written by Lowery S. Sims, then curator of the Department of Modern Art at the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art.
