Everyday Heroes Duo Show with Abdias Ngateu and Daniel Onguene opens on 26th June to 1st August
The OOA Gallery hosts contemporary art exhibitions eight times a year, highlighting established or emerging African artists, noted for their freedom of expression and the originality of their artistic language.
Everyday Heros Duo Show
ABDIAS NGATEU
The roads of the impossible by Sylvain Sankale
Beyond the animals that look so much like humans, Abdias Ngateu has chosen the nagging question of urban travel to carry his allegory. The roads, barely devoted to traffic, are immediately shattered by the disorder and the lack of respect for accepted standards of use, but especially because of the deficiencies of the builders that allow various forms of corruption to involve the use of all kinds of means of transport. The ingenuous and jaded eye sees this colorful folklore so “typical” of Africa, these improbable and overloaded vehicles, but which still run with kicks and wires.
No one will be surprised to learn that Ngateu has already benefited from various forms of recognition for his talent, either in Cameroon itself, where he won the 2015 “Discovery” Award from the Goethe Institute of Douala, or abroad since he was selected to represent his country at Segou’Art 2016 in Mali. He was awarded the third prize “Pascale Marthine Tayou” in the national contest “Young Hopes 2017”, organized by the Doual’Art space. He also participated in the Off of Dak’Art 2018, the prestigious Biennial of Contemporary African Art in Senegal. And in 2020, his work “Taxi Brousse” reached more than respectable bids at the ArtCurial auction. A great career opens before him with the support of the OOA Gallery, which has represented him since 2018, and with great prospects on all continents.
DANIEL ONGUENE
Adventure between the Ruins by Sylvain Sankalé
The “Adventure Between the Ruins” project, which Daniel Onguene presents to us, questions, in his own words “the causes of the emergence of the informal sector in Africa”. Illustrated on the gray backgrounds of a chaotic world, almost already buried in the past, the daily life of these anonymous “heroes”, painted with precision in a very figurative way, who strive to survive however they can, through the practice of an exhausting multitude of “odd jobs”. One wonders how they manage to feed themselves and even their families.
It is true that he has a master’s degree in visual arts and art history, with a focus on painting, obtained just two years ago at the Institute of Fine Arts of the University of Douala in Nkongsamba; he shows a surprising mastery of his technique. He was distinguished and awarded at the age of twenty by the Jack Bell Gallery in London, who scrutinizes the most promising talents of contemporary African art, thanks to a competition open to art schools on the African continent. He continued his journey, exhibiting several times in the best galleries in Cameroon, including the MAM Gallery in 2017 under the curatorship of Simon Njami. The present exhibition at the OOA Gallery is the first exhibition of Onguene’s work on the European continen.
