The artist, Koumy, was born in Lomé, the capital of Togo, West Africa, in 1961. He attended the National School of Fine Arts, but eventually left to follow his own, more personal, creative path. A chance meeting with a Belgian artist, who encouraged him to travel to Europe to develop his career as a painter, saw him move to Belgium in 1990, where he has lived and painted ever since. To date, Koumy has mainly exhibited in Belgium, France, Monaco and the Netherlands. His work figures in the private collections of Princess Caroline of Monaco, the British Red Cross and the London-based art-collector Olivier Doria d’Angri. This exhibition represents Koumy’s first ever showing at the October Gallery and the first major presentation of his work in Britain.

Koumy works in acrylic, gouache and inks on paper. His colourful and exuberant canvases detail his constant search for beauty and his continuing explorations of the mysteries of life. Visual references abound to the ceremonies performed in vibrantly-coloured costumes in the villages of his homeland - where his grandfather was formerly an important chieftain. Large, organic forms, intricately patterned, coalesce in his work to form compositions that unfold as a series of dynamic transformations. Heads and other human forms emerge, dissolve and re-emerge against these fluid background forms to create an ever-changing palimpsest of constantly evolving shape and colour. The subtle metamophoses of line and shape against a background that owes much to the techniques of African printing-making constantly surprise one by their sheer 'modernity:' hints of Picasso, Braque and the early Russian modernists appear with unexpected frequency. When one considers, though, that the source of much of the early Twentieth Century creativity unleashed in Europe resulted from a growing familiarity with African forms of expression, it becomes clear that these 'echoes' of Western art may in fact be the exact opposite, for Koumy's work operates squarely within the ancient traditions of the fertile visual culture that gave rise to European modernism itself.