Frédéric Bruly Bouabré

In the mid-1970s, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré began combining text and image to create encyclopedic, postcard-size drawings, leading to a body of work known as Connaissance du Monde (Knowledge of the World) (1987–2014). This exhibition features a wide selection of works on paper by the artist, providing insight into his vast, open-ended life work.

The drawings contemplate themes as broad as the natural world, aesthetics, liberty, cosmology, and form through quotidian visual recordings of wide-ranging subjects, from animals, tools, and hunting traps to the pyramids and abstract markings on kola nuts. Continued until the artist’s death, these taxonomic works demonstrate Bouabré’s abiding preoccupation with the intersections between language and systems of knowledge, informed by transcribing the daily life of his Bété community in relation to broader linguistic and epistemological frameworks. The drawings on view mark Dia’s first acquisition and second presentation of Bouabré’s oeuvre—the first being a joint exhibition with Alighiero e Boetti at Dia Center for the Arts, New York, in 1994–95.