René Tavares São Tomé and Principe, b. 1983

Overview
René Tavares
René Tavares’ work is based on a process of research spanning through archives, photographs, and literature while bringing to the front stage themes related to historical and socio-political issues that affected different African countries. With a preference for painting and drawing, Tavares’ artistic practice also includes photography, video, and installation. The artist’s work evolves and expands in the form of projects and series that develop over time according to his own experiences of transition between different artistic languages, between the African and European continents, between insular and continental Africa, also between the local and the global, the individual and the collective. By questioning assimilated, neglected, and forgotten heritages and challenging the rigidity of categories and prejudices, the artist’s works are produced in an impulsive and engaged mode to raise awareness and trigger processes of resilience and social empowerment.
 
Using a palette of rich, deep, and earthy colors and working the canvas in layers and all over, Tavares' figurative universe, with its dreamlike atmosphere, is filled with memories and human presence, faces and gazes that look at us throughout space and time. The works also emphasize iconographic and symbolic elements such as cotton flower fields and plantations, specific animals, objects and housings, and the depiction of group portraits. These collective pictures of men and women, either standing peacefully or shown in their interactions and daily activities, aim to reflect on the historical processes of hybridization and miscegenation happening between several ethnic groups, communities, and cultures including components assimilated during the colonial and post-colonial eras. Either through his paintings or multi-medium installations which often included striking words referring to racism and discrimination, Tavares fuses references taken from ancestral practices and belief systems, collective memories, and heritage with contemporaneity and globalization. Thus, the whole work highlights the processes of appropriation, integration, and merging of heterogeneous religious, social, and cultural components that compose many African cultures. 

Tavares holds a Bachelor's in Fine Arts and Visual Arts from the Dakar School of Fine Arts (Senegal), a postgraduate degree in Visual Arts, Painting and Photography from the Rennes School of Fine Arts (France), and a Master's in Art and Heritage Sciences from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon (Portugal). Highlights of his career include the selection as a finalist for the EDP Foundation New Artists Award (2022), the Public Vote Prize for the Norval Sovereign African Art Prize (2022), the nomination for Africa’s most influential new artistic talent (FNB Joburg Art Fair, 2018), and the Artist Revelation Prize at São Tomé and Príncipe’s biennale of Art and Culture (2002). René Tavares' work is included in several relevant collections, such as the Collection of His Majesty the King Mohammed VI of Marocco, the PLMJ Foundation (Portugal), Kloser Contemporary Art, AAD - African Artist for Development, Omali Lodge - HBD Group, Sindika Dakolo Collection, World Bank Collection of the Government of São Tomé and Principe, EDP Foundation Collection, Lisbon City Council Collection, Norval Foundation Collection and Schulting Art Collection.
 

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  • René Tavares, Sketch. Series: Atlantic Nation, 2021
    René Tavares
    Sketch. Series: Atlantic Nation, 2021
    Mixed media on paper
    78 x 58 cm
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