VINCENT MICHÉA | Nº87

Jack Bell Gallery, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2013

Nº87 is Senegalese-based artist Vincent Michéa’s tribute to M'Pongo Love’s historic 1977 album ‘L’Afrique Danse avec M’Pongo Love’. Congolese singer and songwriter M'Pongo Love (1956-1990), was the most feminist of all women soukous singers and actively criticised polygamy and the practice of keeping mistresses in her music: “I will stop singing when the relations between men and women in Africa become problem free… I have a feminist duty to see they fight, that they defend themselves, that they hold their heads high, that they take independent women as examples.”

Vincent Michéa was born in France in 1966, and moved to Dakar twenty years later, holding his first solo show in 1987 at la Galerie Nationale du Sénégal. “Along with many people of my generation, I discovered Africa through its music before traveling to the African continent. It was the time of Fela Kuti and the Dakar Xalam. In 1984 Youssou N'dour did his first concert in France at the Eldorado. I like music and vinyl, as much for the auditory pleasure as the visual aspect they gave through the record sleeves. It is an endless source of inspiration and information from both aesthetic and sociological points of view. For several years I used them as models to improve my painting technique.” Michéa’s work has been exhibited at multiple galleries and institutions, which include the Saatchi Gallery (2014), Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2015) and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2016).