ABDOULAYE KONATÉ

Born in the northern Malian town of Diré in 1953, Konaté was raised in an intellectual household. A graduate of painting from the National Institute of Arts, Bamako (1972—1976), he lived in Cuba between 1978 and 1985 to further his art education at the Higher Institute of Plastic Arts in Havana, exposing him to a multidisciplinary approach to art, one that has stayed with him to this day. Konaté is renowned for his bold, colourful, and intricately detailed large-scale textile installations which comment on his personal life and the complex history of traditional West African craftsmanship.
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Konaté’s vibrant, layered textiles draw on craft traditions in Mali, the artist’s home country. In compositions of colored cotton strips, Konaté reflects on how cloth can commemorate and communicate motifs that range from the ancestral to the contemporary. Konaté’s abstract and figurative tableaux explore both aesthetic language and diverse sociopolitical and environmental issues. Referring to the West-African tradition of using textiles as a means of communication, the artist balances the global issues with an intimate reference to his own life and country. Colour in Konaté's work isn't merely aesthetic and serves as a metaphor for themes as diverse as war, power struggles, religion, globalisation, ecological shifts, and the AIDS epidemic which he poignantly visualised in his 1995 work Lutte contre de HIV. This large
textile work depicts a figure with an imposing red target at its centre, suggestive of being marked by illness, accompanied by a suitcase placed in front, containing three screenprints and a blanket referencing personal artefacts and ephemera related to the suffering brought on by the disease. Abdoulaye Konaté is the recipient of numerous awards, having been named an Officer of the National Order of Mali as well as a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters.

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