Bintou Badjie

Themes of womanhood and blackness are central to the figurative oil paintings of Bintou Badjie. Her work, frequently portraying her family and community, is an exploration of self, home, and lineage. As a biracial woman brought up in Sweden, Ba...

Themes of womanhood and blackness are central to the figurative oil paintings of Bintou Badjie. Her work, frequently portraying her family and community, is an exploration of self, home, and lineage. As a biracial woman brought up in Sweden, Badjie’s art has become a means to explore what it is to be black in a largely white world, the tensions that arise from having roots in two very different worlds, and the daydreaming that this liminal emotional state encourages. Badjie’s vibrant paintings create their own context and language, playing with colour, figures and forms sourced from mysticism, memory, and imagination in order to create a conversation perhaps sometimes more redolent of desire than reality. Badjie manipulates the oil paints she predominantly works with these to create contrast between her subjects (detailed, darkly hued) and the backdrop (faded, somewhat ethereal).