Born in 1952, Dakar, Senegal
Died in 2019, Dakar, Senegal
According to Nicole Guez, sociologist, art critic, curator and author of the Guide de l’Art Africain contemporain (1991), Assane N'Doye is one of the most gifted artists of his generation. Born in Dakar in 1952, N'Doye showed a keen interest in the plastic arts from an early age. As a child, he attended a traditional school where he learned drawing, pottery, modeling and enamel decoration. From 1969 to 1972 he studied at the National School of Arts in Dakar and began to sell his drawings through the gallery on Galandou Diouf Street in downtown Dakar. In 1974, after passing the competitive examination at the National School of Decorative Art in Aubusson, he left Senegal for France. He quickly joined an artist's workshop specializing in textile design for which he produced printing models for major furniture and fashion houses.
At the end of the 1970s, he fully devoted himself to his painting and pursued his artistic research by drawing on his African roots. As a committed artist, in 1982, he co-founded and presided over the Wilfredo Lam association, whose motto was "to be heard", a manifesto of non-European artists wishing to occupy the place they deserved in contemporary art in France. Assane N'Doye paints, draws, colors with the same ease on paper or canvas. He distorts, stretches and recomposes the limbs giving the body an extraordinary flexibility to better transcribe the movement, the dynamism and the strength of the gesture. Born into a Lebou family, a historically matrilineal ethnic group, the female figure plays a major role in his life and in his work: "The woman has an important place in my painting. I proceed essentially by curves, by which I try to transcribe the eternal feminine, the courage, the softness or the power. The curve is also that of the scimitar to express the strength, or that of the calabashes to transcribe the generosity which seem to me to be the components of the African soul".
For nearly 40 years Assane N'Doye took part in numerous exhibitions in France and abroad, attracting collectors and institutions. The Angoulême Museum, the French Ministry of Culture, the Paris City Hall, the African American Museum in Los Angeles, the Cérès Franco Collection now have works by the painter in their collections. In 1990, as part of the Fulbright program, he was invited as artist in residence at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He settled and worked in Los Angeles until 2014, gaining recognition from the American public, collectors and art dealers.
For Sylvain Sankalé, the work of Assane N'Doye, colorful, full of curves and vitality, is very emblematic of what has been called the "School of Dakar" and which, after having faded before the libertarian explosion of the next generation, is coming back to the forefront and is the subject of publications and exhibitions that finally render it justice. Assane N'Doye predicted this when he wrote about his work: "It is part of an era and will ensure its permanence when it becomes the gaze of a past generation."
