"At night, you are all alone with the spirits."
Liby Ousmane Lougué (b. 1987, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) is a neo-expressionist painter, among the most recognizable voices of contemporary Burkinabè art. Son of a painter and a seamstress, he began as a child drawing comics and portraits for his classmates, trained in figurative painting under his father, and refined his technique alongside the painter and designer Hamed Ouattara. An avowed admirer of Jean-Michel Basquiat, he paints at night, in spontaneous dialogue with the canvas, translating the ills, feelings and hopes of his society into an explosion of colour. He represented Burkina Faso at the 8th Jeux de la Francophonie, Abidjan (2017), and has exhibited across Africa, Europe and Asia; in 2026 his works entered the South Korean school curriculum, among the first by an African artist. He lives and works in Ouagadougou.