KHA

Born in Dakar in 1958, KHA grew up between the Medina and the Plateau, surrounded by ceremonial grand boubous, cowries and the stories of the elders. In 1977 he entered the School of Fine Arts, where he forged a rigorous hand for drawing, a mastery of colour and a sense of composition — a solid academic training he has devoted for nearly half a century to a deeply African visual language.

A painter and keeper of memory, he works in acrylic on wall canvas — large panels where masks, ancestral symbols and gilding meet resolutely contemporary questions: the diaspora, knowledge, protest, money. Every title is a Wolof word — Kiray, Jooko, Deloussil — and every canvas a conversation between the Africa of yesterday and the one to come.