Aboudia

Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, known as Aboudia, was born in 1983 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, where he continues to live and work. Largely self-taught, he developed his practice amid the political turmoil that marked Ivorian society in the early 2000s, and the civil violence that erupted around the 2010–2011 post-electoral crisis became a central subject of his early work. Working with urgency and immediacy, he layers paint, ink, and collaged materials onto canvas and paper, producing dense, energetic compositions that record the experience of conflict, displacement, and urban precarity.

Aboudia's visual language draws on the iconography of Abidjan's streets — advertising graphics, comic strips, political graffiti, and the gestural marks of children's drawings. His figures, loosely rendered and often fragmentary, populate canvases dense with overlapping scripts, arrows, and raw color. The work is rooted in West African popular visual culture while drawing on the traditions of expressionism: forms are simplified, surfaces aggressively worked, and the relationship between image and ground kept deliberately unstable.

Aboudia has exhibited internationally at institutions including the Saatchi Gallery in London, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, and at galleries across the United States, Europe, and West Africa. He was the subject of a 2012 documentary film produced during the Ivorian crisis, which brought him to broad international attention. He is represented by Larkin Durey in London, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in Abidjan, Dakar, and Paris, and Etan Cohen Gallery in New York.