FRÉDÉRIC BRULY BOUABRÈ (ZÉPRÉGÜÉ, CÔTE D’IVOIRE 1923-2014) Thirteen ill
Provenance : Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire. Frédéric Bruly Bouabré was born in Zéprégühé, Ivory Coast in 1923, and was one of the first of this traditionally non-literate community to be exposed to the idea of a written language. The discovery inspired a desire to create an alphabet for his native tongue, Bété. The alphabet that he devised was pictorial; each symbol was based on shapes of the quartz stones native to the Ivory Coast. He recorded the alphabet in a series of postcard-sized drawings, executed in pen and crayon. Bouabré followed Alphabet with a number of similar post-card series. The modest medium belies the weightiness of the subject matter concerned with exploring the concepts of language, international diplomacy, sexual politics and knowledge. The first series in the present lot is titled L’Humanite: peuplant la terre. The series communicates the multiculturalism and egalitarianism of Bouabré’s world-view. Each card in the series depicts multiple figures of a particular colour encircling the globe. All the people, regardless of colour or gender, wear the same beatific expression. The cards highlight that as a species we have far more common with each other than differentiating features; we should celebrate this commonality by sharing the world and its resources. Bouabré describes this ‘citizenship of the world’ thus: Whether you come from America, Africa, Asia or elsewhere, I show through my work that we are all part of this same entity, just as two or three children suckled at the breast of the same mother are part of the same body. Because we are all created by the earth, we are truly related in terms of race and colour.
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