Gallery and residency · since 2020
A gallery in Abidjan, a residency in Grand-Bassam and an acquisition fund. We show living West African artists, and we buy their work.
The works
The pieces in the collection, arranged by medium, and the four programmes that make them possible.
14 entries
The January sky, when the dust comes down from the north.
Indigo and ochre laid on thick and broken by a few pale strokes. The canvas is unframed: stretched and shown as it was painted.
A face reduced to three colours and one line.
Flat fields of terracotta and teal, with no modelling. The whole portrait is in the cut of the profile.
Three bands, and the hour is named.
Violet, rust and pale gold stacked with a knife. Painted from life at Cocody over four evenings.
An hour of sitting, and not one line too many.
Confident hatching, shadows smudged by hand. The paper is left raw at the edges, as it came out of the book.
Drawn standing up, on a market Saturday.
Brown ink, fine hatching, nothing reworked. The motorbikes are where they were at eleven.
Three minutes each, at the Cocody market.
Quick studies, open lines, eraser marks left visible. Nothing was finished afterwards, which is what makes them true.
Hands, a chair, a face. Nothing else that day.
One page taken as it stands from a resident's sketchbook, white space and all. The collection buys one per residency.
A light from the side, and she does not move.
A silver gelatin print, grain visible, uncropped. The whole image is carried by the look.
No subject but the pattern.
The frame is filled to the edge. No floor, no sky, no scale — only what the cloth does to the eye.
One shot, one light, one song.
Shot in one night in the downstairs room, with no visible cutting. Commissioned by the collection from a director in residence.
Four exhibitions a year, six weeks each.
Three rooms, north light and no movable partitions. Free entry Tuesday to Saturday, and Sundays during openings.
Six weeks per exhibition rather than three: long enough for a piece to be seen twice by the same person. The walls are fixed, which forces fewer works, hung further apart. Every hang comes with a bilingual room sheet, printed, free.
Three months, a studio, nothing owed in return.
A restored colonial house, four studios, accommodation. The artist owes neither a work nor an exhibition: the only obligation is to work there.
Selection is by application, twice a year, judged by a panel the group does not sit on. The grant covers travel, housing, materials and a monthly sum. Nothing produced there comes to Ogou Art by default; if it interests us, we buy it at market price like anyone else.
A hundred and ninety works, and they travel.
Built since 2014. Lent to museums and institutions across the sub-region, never resold, and inventoried publicly every year.
The collection is not an investment: the articles forbid resale, which strips it of speculative value and returns it to its only purpose, which is being seen. The full inventory — title, artist, year, medium, dimensions, where it is held — is published every January.
Saturday mornings, for whoever turns up.
Drawing, silkscreen and ceramics with the artists in residence. Free, no booking, from ten years old.
No booking means no booking: you push the door, find a place, and leave with what you made. The artists in residence take turns running it, which is not charity — it is the only part of the programme where they meet the city rather than the opening-night crowd.
How we got here
Six dates, and a decision at each one.
2014
The group buys for its offices, with no curator and no inventory. Around thirty pieces in five years.
2020
Three rooms in Cocody. The first exhibition brings together eight artists, none of whom had shown in Abidjan.
2021
A hundred and twelve pieces catalogued, photographed and published. Anything undocumented is returned to the artists.
2023
A restored colonial house opens four studios. Twelve artists in the first year.
2024
Eleven pieces from the fund travel to an exhibition in Dakar, then Accra.
2026
Saturday mornings become free and unbooked. Two hundred children in the first season.
The place
Ogou Art grew out of a corporate collection that had become too large to keep in corridors.
The group had been buying work for its offices for years, without method. In 2020 the decision was made to turn it into something else: an open room, a declared annual budget, and one rule — we only show living artists, and we buy at least one piece from every exhibition.
We do not claim to be an institution. We are a company that chose to spend part of its results here rather than elsewhere, and would rather say so.
Where we stand
A programme is defined as much by its absences.
Six weeks an exhibition. Work that gives itself up in one visit does not deserve a room.
Our artists work with whoever they like, here and elsewhere. We sign nobody.
What enters the fund does not leave it. A collection that speculates drives prices against its own artists.
The annual budget is published. Support that cannot be checked commits to nothing.
The team
Four people, and a great many artists.
Director
Curator
Head of the Residency
Collections Registrar
What is said
Three voices, taken from the residency’s visitors’ book.
Three months without owing anything back. It is the first time anyone gave me time instead of a commission.
Painter, Résidence 2024
They bought the piece nobody wanted to show, and they hung it first.
Ceramicist, Exposition « Terre battue »
The price was on the wall, and so was my share of it. I had never seen that in a gallery.
Photographer, Exposition « Lagune »
In numbers
24
Exhibitions
61
Artists shown
190
Works in the fund
32
Residencies hosted
Contact
A question, a tender, a request for a quotation: write us a few lines and the right company in the group will get back to you.
