The present lot depicts a Senegalese Signare, a term used throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth century to refer to women of mixed African and European ancestry from Gorée and Saint-Louis, who had ties – usually through marriage – to the European businessmen who settled in Senegal.

Derived from the Portuguese Senhora, meaning woman, Signare’s were known to be women of high social standing who wielded significant political and commercial influence over the slave trade, controlling large amounts of wealth and even owning their own land and slaves. Signares served as inspiration for the works of countless poets, writers and artists. Depicted as both heroines and villains, these women were revered for challenging gender norms while criticized as manipulative and status obsessed. They were often shown wearing distinctive Afro-European inspired clothing which was simple in design but made of the finest fabrics, allowing them to meld seamlessly into both Senegalese and French social circles. They also wore signature conical head wraps, an element which N’diaye curiously omits in this work.

Signares perfectly encapsulate N’diaye practice. With one foot in France and another in Senegal, these powerful women represent the confluence of Africa and Europe, and the complexities of Afro-European identity, a narrative that serves as the basis for N’Diaye’s practice. The artist painted several Signares throughout his career but this striking portrait, with its rich tonality, large scale, and captivating gaze, is undoubtedly one of the finest of this series.
Painted in 2001, this tour de force was chosen by the late world-renowned curator Okwui Enwezor and art historian Franz W. Kaiser to feature on the cover of their monograph: Iba N'Diaye, a Painter Between Two Continents, the title of which also perfectly captures this important artist’s artistic ethos.

N’Diaye was born in Saint-Louis in 1928. He studied architecture in Senegal before moving to Montpellier and subsequently Paris in the 1940s, where he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1956, a young Iba N’diaye would take part in the First World Congress of Black Writers and Artists, a Parisian event which gathered black cultural advocates to discuss colonialism, liberation and the framework of Négritude. In attendance was Léopold Sédar Senghor, a poet and founder of the Négritude movement, who would later, in 1960, become the first president of Senegal.

Senghor argued that for black arts to truly be valued as integral to modernity, there had to be a look back to the traditions and local cultural heritage of Africa. The arts were central to Senghor’s political vision for Senegal, encouraging a unified African aesthetic which was embraced by many, but notably, not by Iba N’Diaye. Despite being skeptical of President Senghor’s cultural agenda, Iba N’Diaye returned to Senegal to become a professor of fine arts and assist in the transition from colony to independent state. N’Diaye taught his students art history and valued classical Western studio art curricula; the artist would send some students to France to further their education. Iba N’Diaye and his students did not try to embody a nationalized, innate and traditional African aesthetic and instead looked to their surroundings for inspiration, often producing work which leaned towards the abstract and featured European painting techniques. Unlike many of his colleagues in the famed Ecole de Dakar, who identified as Africans above all else, Iba N’Diaye saw himself as an artist first, and African second.

In challenging the idea of a unified African aesthetic, using strikingly European portraiture techniques, N’Diaye prompts a reevaluation of how we engage with artists and work originating from the African continent, and indeed, what it means to be African