roméo mivekannin
Roméo Mivekannin (born Bouaké, Ivory Coast, 1986) is a painter and sculptor who works at the crossroads of his ancestral culture, Western art history, and the contemporary world. His disturbing images draw inspiration from early colonial photographs and iconic European paintings such as Manet’s Execution of Maximilian (itself based on Goya’s The Third of May 1808). By substituting his own portrait for those represented in the original works, Mivekannin reinserts the black figure into these earlier visual cultures from which they were large excluded. A key aspect of his work is playing with materials, for example, upsetting the boundary between painting and photography by working first in black acrylic paint and then tinting the canvas by soaking it in repeated baths of elixir.
