Ouattara Watts is a New York-based artist who is well-known for his multimedia works that combine African and Western aesthetics to explore issues of modernity and spirituality.
Watts’s works are intersections between different aesthetic traditions, cultures, and iconographic systems. He draws connections between various sign systems and interconnected histories and heritages. His interest spans from the history of ancient Egypt and Greece to the classical West African knowledge systems. (Kathryn Weir, Press Release)
Paris by Ouattara Watts is dominated by blue colors and filled with geometric shapes, circles, and star clusters. The painting is centered on a yellow circle and a Black girl. This painting brings the audience into the world between African spiritual tradition and modern science.
During his years in France, Watts explored the impact of West African sculptural traditions on European modernist artists, particularly Brancusi, Picasso, Modigliani, and the Surrealists. (Kathryn Weir, Press Release)
His complex compositions integrate color, gesture, and multiple layers of wood and fabric textures. The paint surface is filled with organic shapes, cosmic spirals, and geometric patterns. These elements are repeated, creating lively spatial rhythms. (Kathryn Weir, Press Release)
Watts uses various symbols, from The Eye of Horus as a significant symbol of restoration and protection to numerology in charts and arrangements of numbers, to depict the macro and micro cosmos. Watt is locating the symbols and situating them within the local experience; for example, motifs from the Ivory Coast (Andrew Paul Woolbright, https://brooklynrail.org/)
Triangles that reappear throughout the artwork are a traditional Korhogo cloth ornament that represents tree leaves. Watts also invented certain pattern, like the butterfly wings that turn into elephant feet in Sigui (2002). (Andrew Paul Woolbright, https://brooklynrail.org/)
Ouattara Watts: Ouattara in Paris will be on view through July 29, 2023, at Almine Rech, Paris.
Ouattara Watts is a prominent figure in the visual arts of Africa and its diaspora. He is regularly featured in international events such as the Dakar Biennale and the Venice Biennale. His work also has been displayed in important exhibitions such as The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 at MoMa PS1 (2001, curated by Okwui Enwezor) and The Whitney Museum Biennial (2002).