The network in which contemporary artistic practices are produced is a time and a place frenzied, something like an ever-expanding entropy. However, in such a "disorder", valuable intentions are appreciated for those who consume the search for the multifaceted and not circumscribed to a finite space such as geography.

For the Senegalese poet Léopold Sedar Senghor, blackness is a term that contains a duality of objective and subjective signifiers; it is the conjunction of values of the civilization of the black world, and it is also how each black or black community lives the values of their society. The virtuosity/responsibility with which this intangible asset can be built from aesthetic and artistic-visual platforms could be located, for example, in the city of Sitges, outside of Africa, but respecting the essence of values that have transcended a generation to another, in the search for narratives and exercises that claim alterity and break with the schemes that a type of exotic primitivism has haunted the work of African artists or those of African descent for centuries..

Out of Africa (OOA), founded in 2011, is one of the galleries participating in the 18th edition of Art Madrid. With an extensive list and an endless journey through the representation and promotion of African artists and those of African descent, it proposes an approach to the works of four of its creators: Megan Gabrielle Harris, Médéric Turay, Rémy Samuz, and Oliver Okolo. Maintaining its desire to defend the production of contemporary African art, Out of Africa offers an exhibition platform for emerging and established artists to express their respective narratives, values ​​, and experiences through their creative proposals. The gallery provides support and visibility to the exploration, growth, and professionalization of decolonial practices in its curatorial discourses.

The exhibition proposal that brings the works of these four artists presents various currents and manifestations, among which portraiture, figuration, sculpture, and abstract expressionism stand out. Each one of them follows a personal line of work in which they explore media, themes, and narratives that invite debate on identity, the exploration of individuality and the evocation of the senses; proposals that gravitate around a type of revealing emotion that stands out from the hegemony of the conscious and the everyday.

Megan Gabrielle Harris, "Kismet", 2022 . OOA Gallery ©

Megan Gabrielle Harris, (Sacramento, United States, 1990) is a Nigerian descent creator who works between California, New York and Cape Town. In her works, the presence of the female figure is the central theme. And her landscapes in acrylic on canvas reproduce a free female figure every time empowered and sure of her place in the contemporary equation. The psychological treatment of others and herself, the approach to other bodies and her own, move away from the conventions with which black women have historically been identified. The voice of self-recognition imbues her portraits and self-portraits with a liberating force; Megan Gabrielle Harris' paintings are a social vehicle to generate present awareness about how the African female subject has been represented for centuries. Her research tries to break with the codes of association that place the black African woman at the center of a constrained and disrespectful vision, linked to a role imposed by a patriarchal society, which subjugates and exploits their physical bodies and degenerates their spiritual self.

The artist places the woman at the center of some landscape compositions, with earthy colors that fade into the background and impregnate the female presence with even more visual force. As if it were a spinal column, the women portrayed appear with their imposing hair in the center of the composition: confident, challenging, receptive and contemplative... In this way, she manages to recreate scenarios of individuality in outdoor spaces, in fugue postures, with their back to the viewer and even imitating the occasional conventional portrait, so common in the history of Western art but that she simply could not even have imagined in the past. Harris's work ponders the freedom of expression that women have achieved in some parts of the world and that, in others, is still a struggle to wage.

Médéric Turay, “As the wind blows”, 2022 . OOA Gallery ©

Médéric Turay, (Abidjan, Ivory Coast, 1979) currently lives and works in Marrakech, Morocco. He is a multidisciplinary artist inspired by abstract-geometric figuration, with a mixture of that cosmogony that roots the artist in his ancestral past. Turay has a vast reservoir of knowledge from his experiences in various parts of the world. His training indebted to hip-hop music, the graphic novel and his incessant travels through the United States and Africa, provoke an experiential connection in his work. When the viewer finds itself in front of his pictorial entities, sometimes figurative, other times abstract, and permanently impregnated with a complex visuality and a strong spiritual nuance. The artist preserves and cultivates his roots through ancestral masks and symbols, typical of Akán, in West Africa, a town from which he derives this heritage that connects with the vital forces that drive the human being.

Attempting to break away from the racial, social, geographic and political, Turay founds a type of expanded performative painting in which the intrinsic forces of the self are balanced in the symbols of the cross and the spiral. Stability and dynamism, rectitude and fertility, turn his characters into messengers of a cosmogony in which the past, present and future coexist.

Rémy Samuz, “Le marecheur” 2018. OOA Gallery ©

Rémy Samuz, (Cotonou, Benin, 1982) currently lives and works in his hometown. His sculptures fulfill the desire of many artists to humanize their inert creations with a breath of life. The visual force that accompanies his metal fabrics began when, being just a child, he dedicated himself to modeling miniatures of characters that, at that time, were a mystery to those around him. His artistic training, accompanied by specialization in metallurgy, has led this artist to master the technique of weaving iron wire almost perfectly. The rigidity of the metal does not prevent him from "having fun" conceptualizing sculptural works that address vast notions about family, freedom, identity, happiness, and love.

Oliver Okolo, “Disguised persona (Willian Hurley)”, 2022. OOA Gallery ©

Oliver Okolo, (Suleja, Nigeria, 1992) lives and works in Abuja, Nigeria. Self-taught, he is a young artist who has found a way to develop his creative universes in the representation of the human figure. The veil with which conflicts and social problems tend to overlap builds the narrative that the artist then pours onto the faces of his protagonists. Apparent calm, ease, indifference, and some vestiges of alienation, are ideas that can confuse the viewer in that fine-drawn and intelligent criticism that the artist recounts in his men and women peacefully located in calm settings. The absence of chaos, love in the air, the green sky, and the yellow, orange or blue are semantic keys to activate the presence of tension in the faces of the figures that provoke the viewer. The apparent simplicity of the portrait achieved with ease and realism supports the expressive capacity that Okolo works with both the versatility of charcoal and the textures he performs with the brush. The search for technical perfection is one of the artist's obsessions who is committed to using his references in a type of work that dialogues with otherness and proposes an updated reading of what is inherited in contemporary times, and that is part of a time expanded and not in an immovable territory.

Four African and African descent artists come to Art Madrid in this edition with an intrepid exhibition proposal that breaks into the scene of national production to build a story about identity, the foundation of the emerging, and the urgency of an unprejudiced look at African artistic production. The aesthetic and formal quality will not overlook its presence in the exhibition area. These makers own a historical reason that reminds us that from the outside, we can also appreciate the truth of others.

The work of Carmen Baena (Benalúa de Guadix, Granada, 1967) is structured as a poetic investigation into the memory of territory and its material translation into forms, textures, and gestures. Her practice stems from a life experience deeply connected to a specific landscape in southern Spain, understood not only as a geographical space but also as an affective and symbolic sedimentation. In this sense, her pieces can be approached from a perspective centered on direct experience: the landscape not as representation, but as a lived trace that emerges through doing.

Baena activates unique dialogue between historically hierarchical materials. Marble, associated with permanence and monumental tradition, coexists with embroidery, a technique linked to domestic knowledge passed down through generations, historically relegated but here reactivated as a fully-fledged artistic language. This coexistence is not presented as confrontation, but as a field of resonances where the solid and the fragile, the enduring and the tactile, interpenetrate. From a perspective attentive to connections, embodied experience, and knowledge constructed from everyday life, thread becomes a tool for sensitive knowledge.

Color, particularly in her textile works, functions as vibrational energy rather than a purely formal attribute. In contrast to the chromatic restraint of marble, embroidery introduces an open temporality in which intuitive gestures and accidents acquire structural value. Thus, the process becomes a space for listening, where the unexpected does not interrupt the work but rather constitutes it. In Carmen Baena’s practice, creating means allowing the territory—both external and internal—to continue transforming itself.

The Garden Blooms X. 2025. Acrylic and embroidery thread on canvas. 50 x 70 cm.

Your works evoke landscapes, reliefs, and topographies. How does the relationship between physical territory and symbolic or emotional territory articulate itself in your practice?

The physical territory where I was born and spent my early childhood has shaped all my work. I was born in a cave in the Guadix region (Granada), home to the largest complex of troglodyte dwellings in Europe.

The landscape there is full of contrasts: alongside the greens of the vega—fruit trees and poplars—you find the reddish ochres of the eroded hills. And facing the white of Sierra Nevada, the white of snow that still lingers in spring, there are also the greens of the wheat fields and cereal plains. Thanks to erosion and the geological layers that have been exposed over time, the area contains a series of strata that preserve extremely important continental geological records.

For this reason, the area has been designated a UNESCO Global Geopark. I spent a happy, very simple childhood in this environment—living closely connected to nature—and that is the territory that surfaces throughout the symbolism of my work.

Circular Horizons XIV. 2023. Acrylic and embroidery thread on canvas. 72 x 72 cm.

You learned embroidery in a family context, and you draw on the landscapes of your childhood. When did you realise that your immediate world—people, gestures, everyday landscapes—was no longer just a memory, but an active driving force in the construction of your artistic language?

I realised that the universe of my childhood was an active driving force in the construction of my artistic language thanks to a friend, after she visited my cave-house. Through her perspective, she made me aware of what I had been doing intuitively up until that point. This happened more than twenty years ago, and since then—even though I’m aware of it—I continue working.

I like working intuitively, and most of the time I only discover what the landscape has been afterwards. What stays with me is the sensation that inspired the piece once I have finished it.

Sea Breeze III. 2025. Acrylic and embroidery thread on canvas. 60 x 80 cm.

Marble carries historical and symbolic weight linked to monumentality, while embroidery is often associated with traditions that have been overlooked or confined to the domestic sphere. How do you negotiate this clash of cultural status in your work?

For years, marble was the material I was most interested in, and the one I used for most of my sculptural work. It wasn’t until 2007–2008 that I felt the need to incorporate embroidery—a technique I had learned as a teenager.

I began experimenting on paper, using stitching to draw landscapes and trees directly connected to the sculptures I was making at the time, and also working on small scraps of different kinds of paper. I explored the technical and visual possibilities of thread, creating small works in which colour, texture, and the thread’s vibration became the protagonists.

Later, I moved on to larger formats on canvas, where I also incorporated acrylic. These two seemingly contradictory practices—marble and embroidery—have coexisted in my studio and my work without any difficulty. Today, embroidery has completely displaced marble.

Between Heaven and Earth III. 2020. Marble and wood. 25 x 14 x 14 cm.

In your marble pieces, white and gold create an almost meditative atmosphere; in contrast, embroidery and acrylic burst into colour, activating gesture and vibration. Is this a conscious choice, or do the materials reveal their own possible colour to you?

With marble, the choice of white and gold is a conscious decision: I want to convey the spiritual atmosphere of the landscape, and the relationship between human beings and nature. By contrast, the explosion of colour in the thread emerged gradually and more intuitively, and only later did I begin to understand and use the possibilities of this material in a more conscious way.

Whisper Between the Lines XIII. 2023. Acrylic and embroidery thread on canvas. 40 x 60 cm.

To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

When it comes to making my work, I don’t like to plan too much. With embroidered pieces, I do tests on small scraps of paper—trying out colour and the stitch I’m going to use—and with that I try to visualise the final result in my mind. This way of working leaves plenty of space for things to happen while I work. It allows me to discover, learn, and make use of the unexpected.

For example, in some pieces, while embroidering, tangles can occur because the thread tension isn’t right or the thread is too loose. At first, those tangles might seem like they could ruin the piece, but when I see them, I realise they’re visually very interesting. So later I have consciously reproduced that effect in other works.