Miriam Rosen

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  print March 1990

  CHÉRI SAMBA: GRIOT OF KINSHASA AND PARIS

  AS THE SELF-PORTRAIT-CUM-AUTOBIOGRAPHY hung smack at the entrance to his recent Paris show announced, Samba Wa Mbimba N’Zinga Nurimasi Mdombasi, known as Chéri Samba, is a 33-year-old self-taught artist from southern Zaire. In two columns of green and pink type that frame his beaming face and its blue-sky background, the artist tells us that he is the son of a blacksmith, that he dropped out of school at the age of 16 for lack of money, and that he made his way to the capital city of Kinshasa to become an apprentice sign painter. Three years later he opened his own workshop, and before long,

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  print March 1990

  Richard Texier

  Art, commerce, collectibles, silicon chips, and the bicentennial of the French Revolution: there could hardly be a better recipe for disaster than the makings of Richard Texier’s La petite suite des Droits de l’Homme (The little human rights suite, 1989). And yet, as Galileo once said, it moves. The piece is a limited edition of seven prints, issued by L’Avant-Musée to commemorate the French declaration of human rights of August 1789. The images themselves are derived from an equal number of monumental tapestries that Texier was commissioned to design earlier in the year. But this little version

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  print December 1989

  Ben

  Ben’s “Thirteen Sculptures” show included some 50 paintings, readymades, assemblages, toys, machines, and other gadgets meant not only to be looked at, read, and listened to, but also written on, pushed, pulled, pedaled, and eaten. The resulting ambiance was somewhere between garage sale and day-care center, and it is worth noting that, in addition to the regular gallery-goers, there was a steady stream of toddlers-to-teens, and no one looked bored. Worth noting, too, that Ben ( né Vautier) began his career as the proprietor of a second-hand-store-cum-gallery in the late ’50s; that for more than

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  print November 1989

  Taduesz Kantor

  Tasdeusz Kantor, a prolific figure in the world of Polish theater, brought to Paris a quartet of plays, a mini-exhibit of posters and videos, a symposium, and two public discussions, as well as an installation of his paintings, drawings, and objects at the Galerie de France. Kantor, now 74 years old, started out as a painting student at the Cracow Fine Arts Academy in the mid ’30s. He formed a clandestine theater company during the war, and worked as a professional set designer for some 15 years, yet he continued his involvement with painting. In 1955, the same year that he founded the Cricot