Feni's African Guernica displayed at Reina Sofía with Picasso — SkimNews
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- African Guernica, a 1967 charcoal-and-pencil drawing by South African artist Dumile Feni, has been hung on the second floor of Madrid's Reina Sofía in the exact spot where Picasso's Guernica was first exhibited 34 years ago, directly opposite the canvas.
- The work launches a new annual exhibition series titled History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme; museum director Manuel Segade said the initiative aims to pair Guernica with works from different cultural and geographical frameworks and correct the racist parameters that have relegated African art to 'handicrafts or to savagery' in Western art history.
- The drawing, on loan from the University of Fort Hare, has never before been exhibited outside South Africa; Feni, who had no formal training and was known in 1960s Johannesburg as 'the Goya of the townships,' died in New York in 1991 after nearly 25 years in exile.
- Curator Tamar Garb, a professor of art at University College London, argued the two Guernicas should not be equated — Picasso's is an 'anti-war cri de coeur,' while Feni's addresses 'the slow violence, and the actual violence, of racist tyranny' under apartheid.
- Garb also noted that Picasso's Guernica 'itself could not have existed without African sculpture,' pointing to cubism's debt to African sculptural practices that Picasso collected and studied.
- Five other Feni works are on show, including the 53-metre-long scroll You Wouldn't Know God if He Spat in Your Eye and the 1987 charcoal drawing Hector Pieterson, a rendering of the iconic photograph of a 13-year-old boy shot dead by apartheid-era police.
- Garb highlighted that Feni's use of charcoal, pencil, and conté crayon at an 'epic and monumental' scale was almost unheard of globally in the 1960s, placing him in a unique position in 20th-century art.
Why it matters: By placing Feni's apartheid-era drawing — never before shown outside South Africa — opposite Picasso's masterpiece, the Reina Sofía is using its most iconic holding as a lever to reframe the Western canon and force viewers to confront racist violence as both parallel to and distinct from the violence of war. The loan from the University of Fort Hare makes the show possible; the curatorial framing makes it an argument.
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