Abdoulaye Konaté

Abdoulaye Konaté (b. 1953) was born in Diré, near Timbuktu. He studied at the Institut National des Arts in Bamako and then in Havana, Cuba. He began as a painter and as a maker of textile installations inspired by the traditional dress of Mali’s many peoples. Textile remains his medium: his signature motif is a rectangle of factory-made cloth, which he uses like a “pixel”, assembling bright fragments into large compositions where painterly gradations of colour meet decorative elements that set the theme of each work. Konaté is a co-founder of the African Culture Fund, and in 2004 he founded the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia Balla Fasséké Kouyaté (CAMM-BFK) in Bamako. His honours include the National Order of Mali (2009), the French Order of Arts and Letters (2002) and the Léopold Sédar Senghor Grand Prize at the Dakar Biennale (1996). His work is held by museums around the world, including the National Museum of Mali in Bamako, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.