A Girl with Blue Shirt

Ajarb Bernard Ategwa’s paintings reference the celebrated history of portrait photography in post-Independence Africa. In his works, faceless figures are posed within the painting’s frame. Ategwa demarcates his figures with simplified hand-painted contours but fills in these lines with intricate and colorful designs implying their stylized clothing and headpieces, replicating the cacophony of patterns that occur in traditional black-and-white portrait photographs. In areas of the figures’ skin, an abstract painting style supplants individual details and naturalistic skin color. Ategwa’s compositions speak to self-representation and how individuals control their own image, whether in traditional photographic portraits or on contemporary social media platforms. In his paintings, the artist imagines a camera as “an instrument of affirmation of status, ancestry and abundence.” In a location such as Douala, with its open-air roadside hair salons, Ategwa’s recent portraits, such as “Evening Picture” and “A girl with blue shirt” capture an aspect of the urban environment, which has served as the subject of the artist’s larger oeuvre. Ategwa is originally from Kumba, but lives and works in nearby Douala, a large city and economic hub on Cameroon’s coast. He was the 2015 winner of the Laureate Prize, awarded by Banque Internationale du Cameroun pour l’Epargne et le.