Ouattara Watts

Ouattara Watts

The multimedia artist’s first-ever thorough monograph, teeming with cosmograms, numerals and other relics This volume is the first comprehensive monograph on the work of Ouattara Watts (born 1957). Over the course of nearly four decades, the Abidjan–born, New York–based artist has developed a painting practice that places cosmograms, numerals, cloth and other symbols and relics from around the world into relation with each other, leveling hierarchies and creating new relations in the process. Alongside traditional mediums such as acrylic and gouache, the artist embeds materials from a kaleidoscopic range of sources in his monumental, densely layered canvases: papier-mâché, fallen leaves, textiles gleaned from flea markets and photographic reproductions, among others. This volume features essays by writer Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, curator Lawrence Rinder and artist Dieter Buchhart, as well as a conversation between the artist and curator-critic KJ Abudu―the first longform interview with the artist since his 1995 dialogue with Okwui Enwezor. Watts’s artworks are charged with their maker’s enigmatic tendencies. Animated by African spiritual traditions, mysticism and metaphysical cosmologies, his paintings ― large canvases and wood panels that hover between figuration, abstraction and collage ― are dense with unknown elements. -- Zoe Hopkins ― The New York Times