Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo

Primo Marella Gallery, Milan, Italy
Acquired from the above by the present owner

London, Primo Marella Gallery Booth, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, 2014
Milan, Destination...1:54, Contemporary African Art, Primo Marella Gallery, 2014

Primae Noctis Art Gallery, Contemporary African Art, 2014

Glamourous and Fairy is a three-piece mixed collage by Congolese artist Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo created from magazine cut outs of body parts and products. On a vertical black background, a female figure with her head growing tree branches holds a bird like creature. In the lower horizontal piece the torso of a female figure continues on a white background, next to a female head which is placed on top of a blue root-like form.

Bondo re-contextualizes mass-produced commercial images of beauty and consumerism, as fragments of a wider commentary on globalized mass consumption. Though both figures reference the ecological balance of nature, this is contradicted by their construction from images of plastic commercialism.

’My art is an expression of resistance to homogenization, to the creation of a world of uniform people, but also a reaction to the confusion of aesthetic codes and cultural references’, explains Bondo. ‘It is also a reflection on the positive and negative effects of a modern society dominated by multinationals’ (Primo Marella Gallery, Africa, Assume Art Position!, 2010, p. 103).