Sculpture - Senegal (No reserve price)

a Senegalese sculptor from Bignona in Casamance. Coming from a lineage of potters, she learned in childhood to work clay according to ancestral traditions. But very quickly, she emancipated herself from utilitarian pottery to develop a singular body of work, at the crossroads of the sacred, the mystic, and the dreamlike. Seyni Awa Camara sculpts powerful figures, often female, at once human, animal and spiritual. Her hybrid creatures, with archaic and monumental forms, seem to emerge from an ancient world, between dream and reality.

Self-taught, she forged a unique sculptural language, nourished by myths, animist beliefs, fertility rituals, and orally transmitted tales. She works without sketches or models, directly with her hands, in an instinctive and almost mystical relationship to the earth. Her sculptures, fired on open-air bonfires, are marked by a rough rawness and a troubling expressiveness.

Recognized as early as the 1980s by institutions and collectors in Africa as well as Europe, Seyni Awa Camara remained fiercely attached to her village, from which she never wanted to move away. Her work is today hailed as one of the most important on the contemporary African scene. She embodies a rare voice, deeply rooted in African spirituality, but universal in its artistic reach.