Photo by Brigitte Lacombe. Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.
MARIANE IBRAHIM: Gallerist - Focusing on works that tend towards figuration and the politics of depicting Black life
‘It is a collective mission to emancipate and change mentalities that society may have about artists of African origin,’ Ibrahim told Vogue of her relationship with her artists. This mission started in Chicago with Ibrahim’s gallery in 2019, before expanding to Paris in 2021 and this year opening in stately Mexico City premises, complete with Porfiriato facade. Along the way she has brought attention to many of the new stars of the Black figurative painting renaissance, not least Ghanaians Amoako Boafo and Zohra Opoku, and Nigerian Peter Uka (who showed at the Paris gallery in October). The CDMX gallery opened with an exhibition of Hawaiian-born, locally based Clotilde Jiménez’s largescale cubist-inflected collages, paintings and ceramics. Ibrahim is winning fans: veteran conceptualist Lorraine O’Grady quit her mainstay representative Alexander Gray Associates for the gallery, even as an expansive retrospective tours American museums, while Ibrahim debuted Haitian painter Patrick Eugène at the Chicago space in April.
Excerpted text by ArtReview