Acquired directly from 💯the artist by the present owner in 1998

London, Sotheby's, Modern and Contempo💫ra🌞ry African Art, 16 October 2018, Lot 27

Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

"My vision is not bound to a country or continent…Wh🍷ile I use identifiable pictorial elements to be better understood, this project is nevertheless about something much wider. I am painting the Cosmos."

Growing up with in the bustling metropolis of Abidjan and living in three different continents, Watts’s experience is one of true cosmopolitanism. Allusive and associative, Watts’s practice engages with the universal and cosmological, inviting the viewers to engage not with a culture or religion, b𓄧ut w♏ith the underlying spirituality of all existence.

Watts was born in 1957 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The artistic scene throughout the 1970s and 80s in the Ivory Coast was in pedagogical revolt, having become independent from France in 1960 and caught in a moment of political instability and economic expansion. Led by painter Jacques✅ Yankel, artists turned to materials such as sand, clay and other non-European, traditional materials as a means of rejecting the Eurocentricity of the artistic training and searched for a new, post-colonial African identity, growing into the Vohou-Vohou movement: A movement about rupture, renouncing figuration and forging a path towards abstraction using materials from the immediate environment. Watts, having moved to Paris to study at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1977, forged a different path from the Vohou-Vohou artists, participating in their dialogues on abstraction whilst also synthesizing his longstanding interests in Egyptology and ancient Greece, the visual culture and knowledge systems of his West African home, and the moder💜nism and Surrealism he encountered in France.

Despite receiving private patronage from significant collectors such as Claude Picasso and Andrée Putman, and contemporaries such as Brice Marden, Watts struggled to find engagement and acknowledgement in Paris throughout the 1980s. It was amidst these difficult years that in January 1988 he met Jean-Michel Basquiat, who had visited the Ivory Coast two years prior and took an immediate interest in Watts’s work. The two first met in Paris during an opening of Basquiat’s show, when Basquiat famously left his own private view to visit Watts’s studio. Watts recalled, “He went crazy for my work and bought a painting there and then. He was born in the US, I was born in Africa, and Jean had always searched for Africa in his work. It was a chance encounter, he needed someone like me and I needed someone like him.” (Ouattara Watts quoted in: Clotilde Scordia, “Ouattara Watts: Mystical Storyteller,” Happening, 5 September 2015, online) It was Basquiat who convinced Watts to move to New York 𝔍later that year, where Watts still lives and works.

Back in the Ivory Coast, Watts grew up in a family with a syncretic approach to spiritualism, incorporജating elements of many different religions – Catholicism, Islam, Sufi mysticism – into a core of African religions. In France, he was inspired by the lyrical abstraction of Kazimir Malevich and the meditative quality of Mark Rothko’s paintings, which prompted his deep exploration into a spiritual language which transcended religious and cultural grounds. In New York, these investigations culminated into an explosion of symbolic imagery, which has since then become signature elements of hiꦦs work. 

When he painted the present work in 1999, New York had become an intrinsic part of his practice, adding to a complex lexicon of symbols and forms collected throughout his youth in Abidjan, Ivory Coast and training ꦛin Paris. It is characteristic of Watts’s oeuvre, which has synthesized a web of visual cultures and knowledge systems: his West African home, the modernism and Surrealism he encountered in Paris, long standing interests in Egyptology and ancient Greece, dialogues with abstract painting and now the city of New York. Hi🌳s system of symbols and forms stretches from the quantitative and scientific, geographic and musical, ancient and modern, expressing a universal spirituality that transcends geography and nationality.