ART BRUSSELS | GÉRALDINE TOBE: SOLO SHOW

24 - 27 April 2025

  • ART BRUSSELS 2025

    GÉRALDINE TOBE
  • GÉRALDINE TOBE WAS BORN IN 1992 IN KINSHASA IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO WHERE SHE LIVES AND WORKS.
    GÉRALDINE TOBE WAS BORN IN 1992 IN KINSHASA IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO WHERE SHE LIVES AND WORKS.
    She finished her studies in painting at the Institut des Beaux-Arts in Kinshasa in 2012. Not satisfied with her paintings, she burnt her canvases. She then began to paint with the smoke from an oil lamp, linking her art to the traumas of her childhood: night, fire and spirits. Seeing art as a way of soothing the soul, Géraldine Tobe has created a cultural structure (Losa) in Kinshasa which organises art therapy workshops for psychiatric patients. 
    Her paintings deal with ethnography with a more specific focus on the church in colonial history and ancestral spirituality. In her canvases, African masks mingle with disjointed, dancing bodies. She says that using fire and smoke enables her to link the immaterial and physical worlds.
    Tobe's work attracted particular attention during the 2018 Dakar Biennial. It has also been the subject of solo exhibitions in Brussels, Kinshasa and Madagascar. Two major installations are part of the exhibition The True Size of Africa, currently shown at the Völklinger Hütte in Germany.
  • For this year’s edition, AFIKARIS gallery is pleased to present a solo show by Congolese artist Géraldine Tobe
    À MALIN MALIN ET DEMI, 2023
    Smoke on canvas
    170x140 cm

    For this year’s edition, AFIKARIS gallery is pleased to present a solo show by Congolese artist Géraldine Tobe

    In her series “Sans Visage” Tobe brings to light the faces that history has erased: those of African laborers deported to Europe, anonymous and numbered, often absent from official narratives. Neither heroes nor recognized slaves, these ghostly figures drift in the margins of collective memory. Through the act of painting, Tobe restores their presence. Each canvas becomes an act of restitution — an archaeology of forgetting. Forms traced with fire and smoke, born from an inner quest, reject the right to be forgotten and assert the right to recognition. Insects, seen moving from top to bottom and left to right—almost disturbing the faces—symbolize the forced labor imposed by political oppressors, as well as the destruction of the environment and nature.
  • L'INSTITUTION (TRIPTYQUE), 2023 Smoke on canvas 170x390 cm
    L'INSTITUTION (TRIPTYQUE), 2023
    Smoke on canvas
     170x390 cm
  • DILEMME DE NZINGA, 2023
    Smoke on canvas
    140x170 cm
  • ROYAUME DES DAMNÉS, 2021
    Smoke on canvas
    200x170 cm 
  • ‘SMOKE IS A PROCESS OF DESTRUCTION AND RE-CREATION. I BEGAN TO UNDERSTAND THAT SMOKE WAS A TOOL THAT HELPED ME TO HEAL. FOR ME, IT’S A FORM OF THERAPY, A WAY OF OPENING UP. THIS SMOKE GAVE ME THE PATH, THE ELEMENTS TO EXPLOIT. EACH OF US HAS SOMETHING TO

     
  • For more information, contact us here

  •  

     

    GO TO THE ARTIST PAGE

    VISIT OUR WEBSITE