Albert Lubaki learned ivory carving at a very young age. After settling in Kasaï-Occidental, he married Antoinette, the daughter of the chief of Kabinda village. In 1926, while selling ivory figurines along the railway line between Port-Francqui and Elisabethville, he made a decisive encounter with the colonial administrator Georges Thiry.
Thiry, intrigued by painted decorations he had seen in a hut—especially a gray crocodile resting beside two green birds—entered and discovered Lubaki’s visual universe. Struck by the originality of these images, he provided Lubaki with paper and watercolors, encouraging him to preserve and further develop his artistic practice. He also gave him candles, since Lubaki, bound by tradition, could not narrate ancestral stories in daylight and therefore worked at night.
Trained as an ivory sculptor, Lubaki drew without preparatory models, with a spontaneous approach that largely ignored perspective, shadow, or background construction. He favored vivid, non-naturalistic colors applied in flat areas, often surrounded by decorative painted borders framing the composition.
Thiry collected Lubaki’s watercolors and sent them to Brussels to Gaston-Denys Périer, who shared his interest in Congolese artistic production and helped promote Lubaki’s work in Europe. In 1929, a major exhibition of 143 works was held at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
The collaboration between Thiry and Périer ended in 1935, and Lubaki gradually ceased producing works on paper. He remained largely absent from the art world until 1941, when a small exhibition was presented at the Ethnography Museum in Geneva, showing twelve watercolors commissioned by Professor Eugène Pittard. After that, his work disappeared from public view for decades, until his rediscovery in Europe in 2012 during the exhibition Histoires de voir at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris.
