New Vision from old masters: The African neo mannerism
The exhibition “New Vision from Old Master – African Neo-Mannerism” brings together, for the first time within a single narrative, some of the most original and compelling voices in contemporary African art: Chéri Samba, Aboudia, John Madu, Cristiano Mangovo, Ishmael Armarh, Olamilekan Abatan, Amani Bodo, Mfundo Mthiyane, Henry James, Liby Lougue, and Roberto Pare.
These artists come from different countries, histories, and artistic languages, yet they share a common approach: they look to the “Old Masters” not as models to imitate, but as interlocutors to engage with, transform, and contradict.
Their works—ironic, lyrical, technically refined, or deliberately fragmented—offer an entirely new perspective: an African Neo-Mannerism that rewrites the codes of quotation, memory, and form.
This constellation of works will be presented at Black Liquid Art Gallery from 13 December 2025, inviting visitors into a visual laboratory in which past and present do not simply follow one another, but observe, question, and continually reinvent each other.
We live in an age in which every image is visible everywhere, and in which the geographies of vision no longer correspond to the geographies of the earth.
For centuries, the African continent was observed, violated, and defined by others. Today, it observes, absorbs, and reworks—not from the periphery, but from the pulsating centre of the global world.
Under these new conditions, visual cross-pollination is no longer an act of Western domination, nor a form of cultural surrender on the part of the African artist. It is a space of freedom.
The old debates surrounding the supposed distinction between those who create “in Africa” and those who create “in the diaspora” have grown faint, like the echo of another era.
Today, that separation is anachronistic and devoid of substance, because the spaces of creation are now everywhere, and vision itself has become a continent without borders.
African Neo-Mannerism emerges precisely at this crossroads: where memory is not imitation, vision is not dependence, and tradition is not a boundary, but incandescent material.
Images, myths, and styles—once rigidly assigned to a linear history—now become an open field in which ancient and modern masters coexist, observe one another, and enter into confrontation.
Amani Bodo’s work “Mancan gli eredi”, the manifesto of this exhibition, declares this without hesitation.
A figure recalling Leonardo, the Renaissance master and archetype of European knowledge, appears alongside Picasso, the modern creator, seated in an intentionally ambiguous pose somewhere between genius and caricature. On the easel, a quotation has already become a metamorphosis. Emerging from the grass is the face of Amani Bodo—not as a spectator, but as a vigilant consciousness, an embodied commentary on the history of art itself.
The African painter does not simply “come afterwards”: he enters the scene, opens it, and moves through it.
The painting contains further presences that reveal the nature of the game: an allusion to Maurizio Cattelan, a contemporary artist known for subverting the art system through irony, and a small balloon dog that refers to Jeff Koons and to his aesthetics of consumption, childhood, and the sophisticated language of global Pop sculpture.
Everything is quotation, everything is relationship, everything is conscious appropriation.
Here, too, resonates the phrase frequently attributed—rightly or wrongly—to Picasso:
“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
Not as a justification, but as the affirmation of an ancient principle: genius does not merely replicate; it takes what already exists and transforms it into something that did not exist before.
This is how African artists work today: they do not copy the West, nor do they submit to it. They question it, dismantle it, bend it, and, above all, rewrite it.
This is their Mannerism: not repetition, but deviation; not imitation, but development; not heredity, but a reinvented inheritance.
This is why the title “New Vision from Old Master” is not merely a quotation, but a political and poetic declaration: the Old Master is no longer an authority, but an interlocutor.
Within this open, restless, and fertile dialogue, there are no heirs in the traditional sense. Instead, the protagonists of a new visual genealogy finally emerge: free, multiple, undisciplined, and capable of bringing together different eras and worlds in order to generate, once again, a form of beauty that surprises.
