Casamançais - Senegal (No reserve price)

Senegalese sculptor.

Seni Awa Camara is one of those artists introduced to the contemporary African art scene in 1989 by the Magiciens de la terre exhibition, and whose works were acquired and disseminated by Jean Pigozzi in the wake of the show. Like several others featured in 1989, S. A. Camara did not initially intend her work for the international art market and instead confined it 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 directly from the artist’s imagination, without the artist justifying their origins, meaning, or possible interpretations. Taking the form of strange creatures, sometimes two-headed, often built from a common trunk on which emerge multiple bodies of children or animals, her sculptures evoke scenes of motherhood, draw on the Casamance natural world, as well as a broad bestiary.