Africana artist François-Xavier Gbré visited Bryn Mawr and Haverford this fall. This residency took place between September 4-11, 2015, in conjunction with the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery exhibition The Past is a Foreign Country, August 28-October 9, 2015 at Haverford College.
About the exhibition:
How is a country’s national story told through its architecture? When should the structures of the past be dispensed for the future? Ivorian artist François-Xavier Gbré creates photographs that survey relics of the built environment, from the ruins of colonial-era monuments to the futurist symbols of the cosmopolitan city.
About the artist:
François-Xavier Gbré was born in 1978 in Lille, France. After studying at the École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques in Montpellier, he worked in fashion and design photography in Milan. This experience led him to explore African stories through landscape and architecture.
Gbré’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Africa and Europe, including Abroad, Art Twenty One, Lagos, Nigeria; Surfaces and Fragments, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; DAK’ART: The 11th Dakar Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; FLOW, Kyoto City University of Arts Gallery, Japan; We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, U.K.; Synchronicity II, Tiwani Contemporary, London; and Rencontres de Bamako–The African Biennale of Photography. In September 2015, he will participate in The Lay of the Land, an exhibition on emerging African photographers, at The Walther Collection in New York.
Gbré lives and works in Abidjan.