A New Vision of the Old Masters: African Neomannerism in Rome

Black Liquid Art Gallery presents “New Vision from Old Master – African Neomannerism”, an exhibition that brings together, for the first time within a single narrative, some of the most original and incisive voices in contemporary African art: Chéri Samba, Aboudia, John Madu, Cristiano Mangovo, Islimael Armarh, Olamilekan Abatan, Amani Bodo, Mfundo Mthiyane, Joseph Chiemerie, Henry James, Liby Lougue, and Roberto Pare. These artists, coming from different countries, histories, and visual languages, share a common posture: looking at the Old Masters not as models to imitate but as interlocutors to traverse, transform, and contradict.

Their works, at times ironic, lyrical, technically refined or deliberately fractured, articulate a new horizon: an African Neomannerism that rewrites the codes of citation, memory, and form. The exhibition is conceived as a visual laboratory in which past and present do not follow one another but observe, question, and reinvent each other.

We inhabit an age in which images circulate everywhere and the geographies of looking no longer correspond to those of territory. The African continent, long observed and defined from the outside, now observes, absorbs, and reworks from the center of a global visual system. In this context, visual contamination is no longer a Western imposition nor a cultural surrender, but a space of freedom. The old debates that once separated artists “working in Africa” from those “in the diaspora” have lost relevance, because creative spaces today are multiple and vision itself has become a borderless continent.

African Neomannerism emerges precisely at this crossroads: where memory is not imitation, the gaze is not dependency, and tradition becomes incandescent material. Images, myths, and styles once bound to linear history now open onto a field where ancient and modern masters coexist, observe one another, and collide.

The exhibition’s manifesto piece, Mancan gli eredi by Amani Bodo, illustrates this principle. Leonardo appears as a Renaissance archetype; Picasso sits beside him in an intentionally ambiguous posture; quotations mutate on the canvas; and the artist’s own face emerges from the grass as an embodied commentary on art history. The work also alludes to Maurizio Cattelan and includes a miniature balloon dog reminiscent of Jeff Koons, suggesting a network of conscious appropriation. The often-quoted phrase attributed to Picasso about copying and stealing resonates here not as justification but as a statement of an ancient principle: creation transforms what already exists into something that did not exist before.

The participating artists neither copy nor follow the West. They question it, dismantle it, bend it, and rewrite it. Their mannerism is one of deviation, development, and reinvented legacy. “New Vision from Old Master” is thus a political and poetic declaration: the Old Master is no longer authority but interlocutor. In this open and fertile dialogue, traditional heirs may be absent, but the protagonists of a new visual genealogy emerge: free, multiple, undisciplined, and capable of holding together epochs and worlds to generate a beauty that surprises.

New Vision from Old Master – African Neomannerism
Black Liquid Art Gallery, Rome
Curator: Antonella Pisilli
Opening: 13 December 2025, 6 p.m.
Dates: 13 December 2025 – 31 January 2026
Location: Via Piemonte 69, 00187 Rome
Opening hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 12:00–19:00