POSERS (FROM ECSTASY SERIES)
signed, dated, titled and numbered 4/7 Posers (From Ecstasy Series) Bandoma 2011 lower margin
mixed media on paper
105.4 x 75.1; 41 1/2 x 29 1/2in
113.6 x 83.8; 44 3/4 x 33in (framed)

Property of a Private Collector, Cambridge

Provenance
Galerie Angalia, Paris
Bonhams, London
The DinksFãStan Private Collection

Steve Bandoma is among the leading voices of a new generation of Congolese artists whose work interrogates identity, power and consumerism in a globalised world. Trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa and later based in South Africa before returning home in 2011, Bandoma developed a distinctive visual language combining collage, ink, and expressive splashes of pigment.

In Posers (from the Ecstasy Series), the artist orchestrates a vivid collision of fragmented bodies, advertising imagery and gestural abstraction. The frenetic composition, part satire, part self-portrait of contemporary excess, reflects Bandoma’s ongoing critique of the spectacle of consumption and the commodification of identity.

Exhibited widely across Europe and Africa, Bandoma’s work situates Kinshasa within the conversation of global contemporary art while maintaining a distinctly Congolese sensibility; one that merges performance, the visual culture of urban Africa, and painterly experimentation into a potent visual commentary on postcolonial life.

Galerie Angalia, Paris
Bonhams, London
The DinksFãStan Private Collection, Cambridge, UK

Steve Bandoma uses various techniques-drawings, projections, collages and creates a true aesthetic implosion, with a reflection on chaos and suffering as its background.

War, like any political order, is a constructed thing. It’s human. No natural law commands it, and there’s nothing about it that’s immutable or permanent. Conflict isn’t wired into the organs or the bones, and there is a covert bigotry to the idea that war is the only possible destiny for certain people in certain places, or to

the notion that there are societies incapable of breaking out of their own deadly logic of conflict. However enormous it may seem, the conflict in DRC is as inevitable as any other. There is nothing inevitable about it - Armin Rosen