BILBAO, SPAIN.- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is hosting 100% Africa, an exhibition of works by 25 artists living and working in 15 sub-Saharan countries that illustrates the diversity and richness of current modes of expression in contemporary black African art, on view through February 2007. This exhibition is generously sponsored by Seguros Bilbao, a company member of Grupo Catalana Occidente that has collaborated with the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao since its inauguration. The participation in this latest initiative provides Seguros Bilbao a new occasion to reaffirm its support to the art world.

This unique, quite unprecedented exhibition features the most important works from the Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC) owned by collector Jean Pigozzi and considered one of the world’s finest private collections of modern art from the African continent. Also included are several artworks created exclusively for display at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

Occupying all seven galleries on the Museum’s third floor, 100% Africa is an explosive fusion of black Africa’s tradition and beliefs, its past and present, as seen in the work of several generations of African artists. Paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, installations and videos combine to give the visitor an unusual and most enlightening viewpoint on contemporary art in Africa.

Presented in a very distinctive setting created by prestigious Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, working with Marco Palmieri, this selection blends works by internationally-renowned artists such as the great portrait artist Seydou Keita, painters Chéri Samba, George Lilanga and Richard Onyango, encyclopedist and universalist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré and the unclassifiable Bodys Isek Kingelez and Romuald Hazoumé, with others by younger, highly promising artists like Mansaray, Titos Mabota, Pathy Tsingele and Dakpogan.

The Contemporary African Art Collection -
"Before 1989 I had no idea that Africa housed such a wealth of contemporary creation." This was Italian art collector Jean Pigozzi’s considered reaction to the historic and controversial international exhibition Magiciens de la terre, held that year at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, which for the first time brought together contemporary artists from several continents in an attempt to open Western eyes to other directions and currents in contemporary art history.

After Magiciens de la terre, philanthropist Jean Pigozzi, with the help and support of curator André Magnin, began to create the Contemporary African Art Collection. For the last fifteen years, the sheer diversity of the Collection, with thousands of works from the full range of art disciplines in its archive, combined with rigorous, demanding and independent research work done throughout black Africa, has made the CAAC a world benchmark.

In the African cultural context, where contemporary art museums, collectors and galleries are very thin on the ground, the CAAC has played a crucial role in achieving international recognition for modern African art, thanks largely to a two decade-long process of direct cooperation with, and supervision of, a broad range of sub-Saharan artists. Since 1986, when curator André Magnin began preliminary research for Magiciens de la terre , African artists have become much less isolated, in particular with the introduction in Africa of new technologies, which have enabled creative spirits of all kinds to contact each other, get organized and take part in the world’s leading contemporary art events. From its headquarters in Geneva, the CAAC organizes and takes part in individual and group exhibitions in modern and contemporary art museums the world over.

The Western slant - For decades, the very idea of contemporary African art was distorted by the West’s view of things. By 1914, virtually the whole of Africa had been carved up and subjected to European colonization. Apart from politics and economics, the dominion of a handful of European nations was also clearly cultural. As in other “underdeveloped” countries, African art was relegated to the condition of folklore and crafts, the category of contemporary art being reserved for artists in Western countries. However, Africa too had its own Academybased modern art, very much a product of colonial and post-colonial teaching, although neither the quality of the art, or its very existence, ever received international recognition.

It was not until the late 1980s that the West began to look at contemporary art from a universal viewpoint, and trace intercultural relationships between all the continents. From 1986, the artistic production of the “forgotten continents”, Africa, South America, Asia and Oceania, was subjected to systematic exploration. This research made the landmark exhibition Magiciens de la terre possible. What Magiciens de la terre did was to reveal a host of surprising, free and completely unknown works to the world. Since then, a whole, previously ignored slice of contemporary creativity began to take its rightful place in world art history.

An intimate, private art for the whole world - The exhibition mounted at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao brings together internationally acclaimed artists and many younger, particularly promising creative spirits. Some of them live in cosmopolitan areas with up-tothe-minute knowledge of the latest trends and currents, while others, from rural areas, are steeped in the more profoundly rooted African traditions. 100% Africa includes artists capable of inventing authentic “intergalactic machines” for imagining and evoking other worlds, and others, particularly sculptors, with their roots in their native lands, who find their inspiration in African traditions, beliefs, tales and legends.

What links them all is that, while their creations are impregnated by and intimately associated with African reality, they aspire to worldwide legitimacy. The sheer quality of their works undoubtedly deserves acknowledgement in contemporary art history. One might say that these artists provide snapshots of their surroundings, which then work as a contemporary means of transmitting the knowledge and wisdom inherited from the oral African tradition. This is what the people of Kinshasa (in the republic of the Congo) refer to as radio-trottoir , a Franco-African word roughly equivalent to our urban “grapevine”. In André Magnin’s view, 100% Africa underscores the importance of group-related issues proper to the community, proving once again that, despite the artists’ bid for worldwide acceptance and understanding, “the community remains one of the unavoidable realities of life in Africa today.”

Among the artists involved in this unique, ground-breaking exhibition on display at the Guggenheim Museum is the great “universalist” artist from the Ivory Coast, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, creator in 1958 of the Bété Alphabet, a system of ideas, linguistic elements and pictograms documenting the oral tradition of his people. This is one of Bruly Bouabré’s essential works where he illustrates his view that African traditions and reality “possess a radiant beauty that deserves to be interpreted and presented with pride to inform and instruct mankind.” This urge to celebrate the idea of community, coupled with the desire to break down barriers and frontiers, provides the basis for the work of one of the Congo’s most celebrated painters included in the exhibition, Chéri Samba. Samba is the co-founder, together with Chéri Chérin, Moké and Bodo, of what is known as “Zairian popular painting”. “My art is impregnated by my surroundings”, says Samba. “It comes from the people, it concerns the people and is addressed to it. Whatever his origins, an artist must make himself understood the world over.” Through the “visionary,