"Everyone is the same, everyone is equal, everyone can stand side by side."
Liby Ousmane Lougué (b. 1987, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) was born to a painter father, Kou Idriss Lougué, and a seamstress mother, and began drawing as a child, creating comic strips and small portraits that he sold to his classmates. His passion developed into figurative painting under the influence and guidance of his father from 2004, and his first canvases fused acrylic paint with collages of local fabrics gathered in his mother's studio: colour and textile, the two inheritances of his household, joined from the start. In 2008 he met Hamed Ouattara, the Burkinabè painter and designer, alongside whom he refined his technique and approached neo-expressionism, while preserving an artistic identity entirely his own.
Lougué claims his admiration for Jean-Michel Basquiat, and like Basquiat his works translate his identity: painting is for him a means of expressing his pains, his feelings and his vision of the world, with an explosion of colour that gives form to the ills of society. He paints at night, when calm invites reflection and, in his words, you are all alone with the spirits: standing before the white canvas he begins spontaneously, exchanging with the colours until the painting itself speaks back and guides him to completion. His scenes of Burkinabè daily life, bars, streets, families, crowds, carry a quietly egalitarian vision in which everyone is the same, everyone is equal, everyone can stand side by side.
Lougué has exhibited in Burkina Faso since 2011, and in 2017 represented his country in the visual arts competition of the 8th Jeux de la Francophonie in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. In 2020 the Institut Français of Ouagadougou dedicated a solo exhibition to him, presenting twenty-two paintings on the daily life and social realities of Burkina Faso; he has since exhibited with Moogoo Fine Art, Frankfurt, within a programme supporting artists from the Sahel region, and his works are presented by galleries in France and Germany and collected across Africa, Europe and Asia. In 2026 his painting achieved a singular recognition: his works were adopted into the South Korean school curriculum as material for studying composition, colour symbolism and openness to the world, making him one of the first African artists to enter the South Korean educational system, with a monograph on his life and work published in Korea. He lives and works in Ouagadougou.