Casamançan - Senegal (No reserve price)

Senegalese sculptor.

Seni Awa Camara is one of those artists introduced onto the stage of African contemporary art in 1989 by the exhibition Magicians of the Earth, and whose works were acquired and circulated by Jean Pigozzi, in the wake of the show. Like several other artists showcased in 1989, S. A. Camara did not initially intend her work for the international art market and kept it more to a local market: that of the Casamance village of her birth, Bignona. If she still resides there, S. A. Camara now exports her sculptures around the world. Oscillating between craft and naive art, her creations spring straight from the artist’s imagination, without her ever justifying their origins, meaning, or possible interpretations. Taking the form of strange creatures, sometimes two-headed, often built from a common trunk on which appear multiple bodies of children or animals, her sculptures evoke scenes of motherhood, draw on the Casamance natural world, as well as on a broad bestiary.