Albert Lubaki

Born around 1895 in Thysville (now Mbanza-Ngungu), Bas Congo province

At a very young age, Albert Lubaki learned to carve ivory. After settling in Kasaï-Occidental, he married Antoinette, the daughter of the chief of Kabinda village. In 1926, while selling his ivory figurines along the railway connecting Port-Francqui to Elisabethville, he had a decisive encounter with the colonial administrator Georges Thiry.

Fascinated by the paintings decorating the walls of a hut—a gray crocodile sleeping alongside two green birds particularly caught his eye—Thiry entered and discovered Lubaki’s visual world. Impressed, he provided Lubaki with paper and watercolors to preserve and develop his art. He also gave him candles, as Lubaki, constrained by tradition from recounting his ancestors’ stories in daylight, worked at night.

Trained as an ivory craftsman, Lubaki drew spontaneously without models, paying little attention to shadows, backgrounds, or perspective. He applied bright colors, often far from reality, in broad areas, and the edges of his works were almost always framed with colorful margins.

Thiry, captivated by his work, began collecting Lubaki’s watercolors and sent them to his superior in Brussels, Gaston-Denys Périer, who also had a passion for Congolese art. Périer worked to introduce Lubaki to the European public. In 1929, a first exhibition of 143 of his works was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.

The collaboration between Thiry and Périer ended in 1935. Deprived of support, Lubaki gradually abandoned his paper art. Nevertheless, in 1941, a new exhibition was dedicated to him at the Ethnography Museum in Geneva, presenting twelve watercolors commissioned by Professor Eugène Pittard. After that, no exhibitions featured his work until 2012, when Lubaki was rediscovered in Europe during the Histoires de voir exhibition at the Fondation Cartier for Contemporary Art in Paris.