Seydou Keïta at Grand Palais

The Seydou Keita exhibition which opens today at the Grand Palais, and the accompanying catalog, are impressive. They come from the Jean Pigozzi photograph collection. He shared these following words regarding the show.

« Many many years ago, I went to a small exhibition in New York on African art, and I stumbled on two photographs that said “Photographer unknown, Mali”. I was so impressed by the quality of these pictures, that I asked my curator, André Magnin, to go to Bamako, Mali and find who took these wonderful photographs. After a few days, André found an old man sitting on a big metal case that contained about 10,000 negatives. This old man was Seydou Keita. We started working with Seydou, published books, have done shows around the world, and saved a lot of his negatives.

– Jean PigozziThe CAAC is the largest private collection dedicated to contemporary African art in sub-Saharan Africa. It was created in 1989 by Jean Pigozzi, with the collaboration of André Magnin, who was artistic director until 2009. The collection, based in Geneva, includes nearly 12,000 works.