Maurus Mikael Malikita : Mama Africa

Kyo Art Gallery presents Maurus Mikael Malikita's solo exhibition entitled Mama Africa.

 

Maurus Mikael Malikita of Makonde ethnicity was born in Tanzania in 1967 and trained in the Tingatinga painting tradition, a highly colorful spontaneous genre used to illustrate local flora and fauna.

 

The iconic revolution wrought by Malikita offers a painting more attentive to popular communication. The painting-souvenir of the cartoon giraffe gives way to the painting of City Life the popular urban dimension of the crowded and chaotic capital Dar es Salaam takes over and depicts the human movement that is active in markets in dressing rooms and hospitals.
The Hospital series featured in the gallery shows a series of characters with funny faces and beady eyes intent on various actions of hospital life, texts in Swahili language interspersed with the images for a compositional choice of sequential picture as in a kind of comic strip.

Malikita's capacity for expressive experimentation takes a new development with the Erotic Series, African symbols and myths are depicted by provocative female figures squeezed and compressed into a limited two-dimensional space, music, witchcraft and Mother Africa are skillfully represented in pop style as archetypes of African collective memory.

 

The female figure does not adhere to the canons of proportion, but is embedded in the silhouette of the African continent, the colors and background of the painting are bright and vivid and take up, the famous African fabrics, kanga.

 

The painting dense, flat, lacking in nuance, but rich in detail, where the violent, bold colors are the medium that under the confident action of the brush becomes image.

 

African art with Malikita takes on its most authentic and full creativity, reworking old and new tradition to reveal through the real and the imaginary the pure state of his own country.