Mihalina Nyota Buzilu paints vanity with the oldest equipment the theme owns, a mirror and a skull, and makes the arrangement carry her own point: a life that should be welcomed with integrity and gratitude, lost instead to the craving for admiration. In Pembeni mwa nafsi (At the Edge of the Self), the reclining body is painted cold and the skull is warm. In a short video, she explains the vanity, the narcissism, and the death her subjects work to forget.
In Kinshasa, some of the best painters never went to art school. They learned on billboards and shop signs, in workshops where a master teaches by hand. Their work now hangs in the Pompidou. Meanwhile the Académie des Beaux-Arts, founded under Belgian rule in 1943, trains graduates the art world rarely notices. We call the workshops the street, as if they were the informal cousin of a real education. But which one is really the newcomer?
An exhibition celebrating Congolese art where Congolese people owned basically none of it. A market boom that left local artists poorer than before. Master painters who no longer touch a brush. Galleries where most of the paintings are Pinterest copies. Welcome to Kinshasa’s art world a decade after “Beauté Congo”—where success became the architect of failure, where being discovered by the West meant losing yourself, and where the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. This is what cultural extraction looks like in the 21st century: not with colonial officers and forced labor, but with champagne openings, international acclaim, and prices so inflated that an entire community can no longer afford its own culture.
Phinet Kisimba returns with a quieter painting than Sala Po Ozala and a harder subject. A woman in a yellow turban sits thinking against a red that stands for her period, while the ceremony that once would have guided her hangs on the wall in a frame. In the video, Kisimba calls on mothers and wise women to take back a role that has lapsed: menstruation, he says, is not a taboo subject.
Antoinette Lubaki painted in colonial Katanga in the 1920s alongside her husband Albert. Their watercolors traveled to Brussels, Geneva, and Paris, and were filed under his name. What the colonial archive missed was a partnership in which the visual language came from her side, carried from the mural tradition she grew up in into a marriage that worked as one. This article traces what their work actually was, how it was absorbed into a single masculine signature, and what an honest recovery looks like when the goal is not to flip the erasure but to retire it.
Patrick Kusakana paints ancestral power as a family matter. La reine Mambueni is his grandmother, the nganga-kisi who healed whatever troubled the family, enthroned here on a red stool with ivory on her face and her arms spread the width of the canvas. In a short video, he explains the black and white, the tusks, and the animals she protects.
In a rare 1979 interview, Pilipili Mulongoy—once a humble plumber—reveals how sketching a simple wooden figure ignited his rise to prominence in modern African art. Raised by a master drummer, he first learned the communal power of creativity before honing his signature “petit point” style under mentor Pierre Romain-Desfossés. Now, his reflections illuminate the unbroken thread between traditional craftsmanship and modern expression. Discover how one man’s relentless curiosity bridged worlds and inspired a new generation of Congolese artists.
Claude Bosana, Œil d’Aigle to Kinshasa’s art world, paints a tiger and a bonobo who cannot live together sharing the one interest they have in common: a cigarette. His advice is aimed at the people who hold a portion of authority. On the ground where they stand, the fruit set aside will keep. The zebra will not.
Billy Gibula, painter and one of Kitokongo’s founders, answers tribalism with a figure who wears the argument: a wooden mask above a boldly printed shirt, a banner reading NON AU TRIBALISME across the chest, and, just below the banner, a machete at rest in a hand painted every color at once. In the video he says why: we are all human, all one family, and love must reign.
Winnart Nsangu’s Kin Eza Mboka Na Nga (Kinshasa Is My City): a man painted in full color against a Paris that stays a sketch. Nsangu usually leaves his faces without eyes. Here the eyes push through rose-tinted glasses, and they are looking at home.
Gédéon Ndonda introduces himself in the video with one commitment: he paints in the style populaire. In Le Réveil d’un Géant (oil on canvas, one meter square), his one-sentence message, that Africans should wake up and take their destiny into their own hands, becomes literal painted hands: one balancing the Earth on its fingertips, one lying open beneath a circuit board, while an old merman at the edge of the scene raises a horn to his lips.
Jonathan Malanda paints women because, he says, it was through women that his mother inspired him to work. In Éternité (2024, acrylic on canvas, 100 by 110 centimeters), a woman arches on a wooden chair with her face hidden behind her raised arms while a zebra bends its head toward her. In a short video, Malanda says what the painting is for: the love and the ambiance between man and nature.