1923 - 2014

Born in CI.

The work of the Ivorian artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré had a single objective: to record and transmit information about the known universe. Devoting his life to a quest for knowledge, Bouabré captured and codified subjects from a range of sources, including cultural traditions, folklore, religious and spiritual belief systems, philosophy, and popular culture. “I do not work from my imagination," he once said. “I observe, and what I see delights me.”

Born in Zéprégühé, in western Côte d'Ivoire, Bouabré served in the French West African Navy and began his career as a government clerk in the colonial administration of French West Africa in Dakar, Senegal. Following his return to Abidjan, he worked as an informant and researcher to French ethnographers and anthropologists collecting and archiving information about his native peoples and other West African communities. In 1948 he experienced a prophetic revelation that prompted his exhaustive documentation of wide-ranging topics, which he first compiled in the form of writing, and subsequently through his art. “Thus, not knowing how to sing, not knowing how to dance, I preferred to write and make lots of drawings,” he explained.

In the late 1970s, after decades of making handwritten manuscripts, Bouabré began to draw on found cardboard, combining image and text. From the 1980s onwards, as the scope of his interests grew, he embarked on an all-encompassing project, drawing from observation almost daily. He titled the open-ended series of drawings Connaissance du Monde, and worked on it until his death in 2014, systematically compiling and classifying forms, ideas, and a wide range of phenomena, including domestic objects, cloud formations, and tribal scarifications, as well as the political climate and world events. Synthesizing West African traditions and his global quest for knowledge, Bouabré envisioned his work as a vital form of didactic thought that reflected both personal and universal experiences.