Pascale Marthine Tayou

This self-taught artist born in Cameroon in 1967 has been widely publicized for better and for worse. He began the year with an auction record in London for twoPoupées Pascale (evoking African ritual sculptures) that fetched $41,5001. He received an enthusiastic welcome at the 46th edition of Art Basel ( June 17-21), participated in the inauguration of the Paris gallery VNH (Gri-Gri, April 25 – June 20) and showed his work at the Brussels Bozar (Boomerang, September 24-June 20), and is programmed for the forthcoming reopening of the Paris Museum of Mankind. Amidst this dense news, a violent and unexpected event occurred in Ukraine, where one of his works was blown up! On 22 June 2015, the pro-Russian forces destroyed his Make Up, a gigantic installation shaped like a tube of lipstick, dedicated to the women of the Donbass, to thank them for their involvement in the reconstruction of Donetsk after the Second World War. The Continua gallery reacted by choosing Pascale Marthine Tayou to design the poster of the group exhibition to celebrate the gallery’s2 25th birthday. The exhibition will contains works by a number of other politically motivated artists like AI Weiwei, Kader Attia, CAI Guoqiang, CHEN Zhen and Kendell GEERS.

  1. Sotheby’s London, 11 March 2015. The same Poupées had just been part of an exhibition that Pascale Marthine Tay-ou created to echo objects in Lyon’s African Museum (Fast & slow, 17 September 2014 – 15 February 2015).
  2. Exhibition Follia Continua!, 26 September – 22 November 2015.
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Pascale Marthine Tayou