Abidjan is riding a bold new wave of contemporary art. This vibrant city, Ivory Coast’s economic heartbeat, is transforming into a global hub for creative innovation. Its streets, galleries, and museums pulse with fresh energy, driven by a dynamic generation of artists reshaping the nation’s cultural identity. In just five years, Abidjan has welcomed new galleries, the Something Art Space video art center, a contemporary art museum, artist residencies like Maison N’Zima, founded by celebrated Ivorian designer Jean Servais Somian, and online art marketplaces. A 2024 public fund of one billion FCFA (approximately $1.7 million USD) launched by the Ministry of Youth Promotion in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, fuels these creative industries. From international stars to emerging talents, these artists are blending heritage with cutting-edge vision, captivating curators, collectors, and figures like Chris Dercon of Fondation Cartier, who visited in April 2025. Dive into the creators leading Abidjan’s artistic revolution!
At the heart of this vibrant scene, the artists themselves, the primary drivers of renewal, assert their presence with boldness. Joana Choumali, an international figure in African photography, concluded a solo exhibition at Farah Fakhri Gallery in July 2025, her first in Ivory Coast in over a decade. Weeks earlier, during the second Abidjan Art Week, held from April 23 to 27, 2025, powerful works by Aboudia were showcased in a group exhibition at Rotonde des Arts, curated by art critic and philosophy professor Yacouba Konaté. Meanwhile, leading artists like Yeanzi, Mounou, Konan Pascal, and others inaugurated La Maison de l’Art at the SGBCI Foundation in Grand-Bassam on May 15, 2025, reaffirming the centrality of local artists in ongoing institutional dynamics. At Abobo’s Musée des Cultures Contemporaines Adama Toungara (MuCAT), painter Obou, a cornerstone of Ivory Coast’s contemporary scene, adorned a monumental 12-meter-wide wall with his Souvenir de Boribana series for the Great History of Elephants exhibition, running from June 21 to November 23, 2024. Alongside these established names, younger, often lesser-known voices are rising, their creative power vividly shaping Abidjan’s luminous art scene.
Carl-Edouard Keïta: Reimagining Cultural Roots
Based in New York, Carl-Edouard Keïta, 33, is a draftsman embodying the new wave of Ivorian visual artists with rare artistic maturity. Represented by the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery, he was discovered while studying at the New York Academy of Art. His masterful pastel-and-acrylic canvases shone in his first Abidjan solo exhibition, Goumbé, in February 2024. The show not only showcased his technical prowess but also revealed an aesthetic vision rooted in the history of migrations in Abidjan’s working-class neighborhoods. Through Goumbé, Keïta revives the memory of forgotten 1960s cultural associations, drawing inspiration from Jean Rouch, the pioneering French ethnographer-filmmaker whose documentaries, like Moi, un Noir (1958), captured the vibrant social and artistic movements of West African urban life, including Ivory Coast’s Goumbé communities. His large-scale works, like Goumbé or Yéyé, pulse with collective energy, inviting viewers to join the dancing figures or gather as in the lively Goumbé streets. Follow Keïta on Instagram: @carlkeita
Mimi Brignon: Collaging Collective Memory
Mimi Brignon collects old newspapers, tears them, reassembles them, and sometimes coats them with coffee and acrylic to create raw, narrative-driven paintings. His collage work is deeply rooted in the city and national memory, unearthing fragments of history, forgotten words, and fleeting images to recompose them into living archives. His series on the Africa Cup of Nations, paid a vibrant tribute to popular fervor and collective imagination. In 2024, institutional recognition came with the acquisition of one of his works by the Academy of Sciences, Arts, Cultures of Africa and African Diasporas (ASCAD). His career also includes notable appearances in exhibitions like FUTURA in 2023 at the Windsor Gallery, a collective show exploring possible futures of African creation, and presentations in Abidjan’s independent spaces, solidifying his place in the local cultural fabric. Brignon’s technique blends gestures of tearing and rebuilding, playing with the transparency of printed texts and painted layers, weaving an aesthetic of fragments that speaks to both the fragility and persistence of memory. Follow Brignon on Instagram: @brignon_mimi
Adjoba Marie: Dreamlike Explorations
Another vibrant voice in Abidjan’s new wave is Adjoba Marie, a young artist whose dreamlike, introspective universe captivates viewers. Winner of the Ivorian-Belgian Friendship Art Competition and a 2023 Alberto Cortina Prize finalist, she crafts surrealist self-portraits that delve into the complexities of human identity. “My works translate the search for meaning, anxiety, the quest for truth, and the multiplicity of personalities within each person,” Adjoba Adiko explains, noting that her recurring use of her own face is “a pretext to explore humanity in all its complexity.” Her canvases, brimming with enigmatic symbols and dreamlike atmospheres, navigate the depths of the psyche through metamorphoses. In summer 2024, she shone in a group exhibition at Kynome Gallery, adding a profound, introspective layer to Ivory Coast’s contemporary art scene. Follow Adjoba on Instagram: @adjoba
Massa-Chula: Sculpting History
Ibrahim Khalil Touré, known as Massa-Chula, is another striking figure in Ivory Coast’s emerging art scene. A painter and sculptor, he roots his practice in African ancestral forms while reinterpreting them through a contemporary lens. Massa-Chula interrogates, deconstructs, and reconstructs, treating the mask not as a static relic but as a living political space. His works speak of wounds, silences, beauty, pride, and transmission. His participation in the 2024 Abidjan Auction Company (ABAC) auctions marked a significant milestone, signaling his entry into the international contemporary African art market. In March 2025, he donated two sculptures, Nègre calciné and Kunta Kinté, to the House of Slaves on Gorée Island in Senegal, a powerful act of memory and symbolic reclamation ahead of his participation in the off-program of the 2024 Dakar Biennale. This gesture, celebrated by the Gorée community, earned him the title of Ambassador of the Gorée Pilgrim. Follow Massa-Chula on Instagram: @chulaasucessfulling
Angelo N’Guessan: Street Art’s Prodigy
Since 2016, Angelo has transformed the city’s walls into living canvases. His murals depict children in motion, captured in the energy of choreographic steps that define their communal life, creating an intimate yet collective iconography with striking graphic intensity. Born in 2003, Angelo quickly established himself as a key figure in Ivorian street art. His favorite medium, the airbrush, has forged a distinctive visual signature. By repurposing a tool often linked to commercial or decorative art, he has turned it into a poetic weapon, rivaling traditional artistic mediums. Despite his bold approach, he pursued rigorous academic training at Abidjan’s École des Beaux-Arts, refining his perspective and deepening his artistic research. His work bridges the urban and the ritual, popular expression and institutional art codes, illustrating how a generation of Ivorian artists is redefining contemporary art by blending cultural heritage with unconventional practices. This year, his selection for The Echo of the Walls, a collective exhibition of Ivorian street artists at the BJKD Foundation during Abidjan Art Week 2, confirmed his place in the formal art scene. Follow Angelo Nguessan on Instagram: @angeloguessan
Perfect Black: Photographing the Unseen
Perfect Black addresses an invisible urgency. With his Apocalypse series, exhibited at the LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery’s Discoveries 7 (July-August 2025), he confronts the taboo of mental health in Africa. In just three years, this architecture student has developed a philosophical and political visual approach. In just three years, this architecture student has gained global recognition, with his work Trouble featured at the 2023 Africa Foto Fair and a 2025 PICTET Prize nomination. Jean-Luc Konkobo, his real name, offers a critical perspective on contemporary society, where mental health issues remain buried, ignored, or stigmatized. Follow Perfect Black on Instagram: @perfect__blvck
Capucine Minot: Textures That Tell Stories
French-born Capucine Minot, an Ivorian resident for eight years, captures the new wave’s sensory depth. Her black-and-white drawings transform textures—rhinoceros skin, masks, pineapples—into meditations on identity and the sacred. Reimagining Dan and Baoulé masks and the iconic Ivorian elephant, her work resonates with cultural pride. A 2023 David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation finalist, Minot supports women’s causes in Ivory Coast. Her works at the Discoveries 7 group show at LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery stunned viewers, with many mistaking her drawings for photographs. Follow Minot on Instagram: @ateliercapucineminot
Nicodème Gueho: Art from the Everyday
Nicodème Gueho, 29, stands out with an unexpected medium: recycled plastic bags. His Apotheosis series closed the exhibition The Great History of Elephants at MuCAT, celebrating the victories of Ivory Coast’s national football team and the nationwide festivities that follow. Beyond aesthetics, Gueho’s work is rooted in a profound personal experience. Growing up surrounded by plastic bags, symbols of environmental degradation, he felt powerless. When he chose to become a painter, he transformed this once-threatening material into a creative resource, turning it into a form of redemption. His approach aligns with the 1970s Vohou Vohou movement, which rejected academic constraints and used “anything” to create. Gueho adds an ecological consciousness, reintroducing plastic waste into the artistic cycle. Primarily a portraitist, he captures faces with striking hairstyles that carry the memory of individuals and communities, bridging aesthetic heritage, social realities, local traditions, and global challenges. Follow Gueho on Instagram: @nicodemegueho
Kibrart: The Future of Visual Storytelling
Koné Ibrahim, known as Kibrart, a second-year master’s student at Abidjan’s École des Beaux-Arts, is a rising star in the contemporary Ivorian scene. Blending digital collage and pictorial photography, he develops a hybrid aesthetic resonating with the era of multiplied images. His work garners significant attention on social media, connecting with a generation eager for new visual narratives. At the core of his practice is the television, elevated from a mere object to a mental totem. Symbolizing intimate projections, hidden emotions, and fragmented imaginaries, it reflects the power of screens in shaping subjectivity and perception. For Kibrart, the television becomes an inner projection surface, a silent mirror of unexpressed thoughts. His visual and conceptual exploration earned him local recognition, including being among the 100 laureates of the 2023 Alberto Cortina Prize, signaling his potential to engage in global critical discourse. In December 2024, his participation in Abidjan Art Fair Act 2 cemented his breakthrough. Follow Kibrart on Instagram: @kibrartartcontemporarystudio
Carl Keita, Capucine Minot, Massa-Chula, Mimi Brignon, Adjoba, Angelo, Perfect Black, Nicodème Gueho, and Kibrart: each of these names, in their own way, contribute to the rise and renewal of Abidjan’s contemporary art scene. From the streets to institutions, from galleries to auctions, from intimate gestures to public expression, these artists embody a creativity that is rooted, open, and ambitious. Far from blending into a globalized model, they reinvent forms, narratives, and materials. And in a city where art finally seems to be claiming the space it deserves, they are the faces to watch, the voices to hear, the works to see. Now.
Contribution by: Ange Alvine Yao
Translation & Edition: DakArtNews
Bridging Africa and The World Through Contemporary Art 
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