African art piques collectors’ interest

KAMPALA: Lilian Nabulime hasn’t forgotten the time in the 1990s when the Ugandan capital had just one commercial art gallery, a small space that emerging artists struggled to get into. Now, there are at least six, including one whose curator recently exhibited the sculptor’s contrarian work.
Nabulime’s show, which has attracted audiences for its conspiratorial take on the peculiarities of urban “gossip,” might never have happened if she hadn’t approached Xenson Art Space and asked for the opportunity to exhibit her work.Her work includes terracotta works topped with the deformed facial features of gossip bearers.

Nabulime, who teaches sculpture at a prestigious art school in Kampala, is among a growing list of artists whose body of work contributes to a feeling among curators of an exciting moment for Ugandan art. Their sense of cheer mirrors a similar trend across Africa that’s fuelled not just by an explosion of compelling new work but also by the growing ability of curators from the continent to reach new collectors at a time of rising global interest in modern African art.
There are fresh signs of this momentum. The Ivorian painter Aboudia was the world’s bestselling artist in 2022, selling two more artworks than the popular Damien Hirst, according to the Hiscox Artist Top 100 survey. And in November, an artwork by the Ethiopian-born artist Julie Mehretu fetched $10.7 million at auction, a new record for an African artist.

In addition to the annual Art Auction East Africa in Kenya – during which dead and living artists are valued if not rediscovered – the most ambitious curators from Africa are accredited to attend events such as the influential Art Basel. One of Africa’s most prominent art spaces, Afriart Gallery runs a training programme for artists, with the most successful among them now able to show their work abroad.
Those artists not represented by Afriart Gallery have choices, including an alternative space in a disused banking hall in Masaka, Uganda, the scene now of a vibrant artistic community. A painter born and raised there, Godwin Champs Namuyimba, has had some of his pieces sold for six figures at auction in Europe despite being largely unknown at home.
The regular art auction in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, also has been critical in the reappraisal in recent years of Ugandan artists such as Geoffrey Mukasa, a painter who was underappreciated in his lifetime and died poor but now commands hefty prices.
Many of Mukasa’s works remained unsold by the time he died in 2009, but his work is now acknowledged as “timeless,” said Danda Jaroljmek, an influential curator whose Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi puts on the annual auction.