artist/ Mwamba

République démocratique du Congo (RDC)

Born in Kasai province, Théo grew up in Lubumbashi before moving to Kinshasa in 2017 to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, from which he graduated at the end of 2022. Alongside his studies, he works.
While so many young artists immediately try to settle on a style, without always having sufficiently explored it, Théo Mwamba takes the opposite approach: he researches, experiments and is passionate about the diversity of worlds that painting allows him to reach. His research led him to develop a technique for painting on printed canvas, based on historical documents or photographs of his own work.
He quickly made a name for himself with realistic paintings with a strong social connotation. His very first interest, while still a young student, was childhood. More specifically, he focused on child labour, symbolised by bar codes applied to realistic scenes. The theme of injustice is echoed in his second series, dedicated to Congo’s colonial past. Using archive images, he pays tribute to the victims of the independent state of Congo. His third series, a tribute to the emblematic figures of the Congolese music scene, is a further change of setting and subject. Finally, he returns to social issues in a current series on the theme of night work, where chromaticism and the play of light predominate.
Exhibited for the first time in Europe in the group show “Congo – Passé composé”, in spring 2023 in Paris, he will have his first solo show in February 2024 in Kinshasa, at the Texaf-Bilembo cultural space.