"I wanted to show their suffering, their way of life."
Armand Boua (b. 1978, Abidjan, Ivory Coast) is one of the leading figures of contemporary Ivorian painting. Working with tar and acrylic on found cardboard, the same boxes used as makeshift shelters by the street children of Abidjan who are his central subject, he builds and then tears, scrapes and strips his layered surfaces, leaving fragmented figures that shift between presence and erasure. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Centre Technique des Arts Appliqués in Abidjan, Boua represented Ivory Coast at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and exhibited at Dak'Art (2010, 2022) and in "Pangaea II" at the Saatchi Gallery, London (2015). His works are held in the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Mohammed VI Museum, Rabat.
