In the mid-1970s, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré began combining text and image to create encyclopedic, postcard-size drawings, leading to a body of work known as Connaissance du Monde (Knowledge of the World) (1987–2014). This exhibition features a wide selection of works on paper by the artist, providing insight into his vast, open-ended life work. The drawings contemplate themes as broad as the natural world, aesthetics, liberty, cosmology, and form through quotidian visual recordings of wide-ranging subjects, from animals, tools, and hunting traps to the pyramids and abstract markings on kola nuts. Continued until the artist’s death, these taxonomic works demonstrate Bouabré’s abiding preoccupation with the intersections between language and systems of knowledge, informed by transcribing the daily life of his Bété community in relation to broader linguistic and epistemological frameworks. The drawings on view mark Dia’s first acquisition and second presentation of Bouabré’s oeuvre—the first being a joint exhibition with Alighiero e Boetti at Dia Center for the Arts, New York, in 1994–95.

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré is curated by Ella den Elzen, curatorial assistant.

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré was born in Zéprégühé, Côte d’Ivoire, in 1923. For three decades, Bouabré worked as a clerk, translator, and researcher for various offices within the French colonial administration of what is now Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal. After experiencing a transformative vision in March 1948, he created a writing system combining letters and pictographs for his native Bété language, after which he wrote bilingual Bété-French texts on diverse subjects. In the mid-1970s, he began working as an artist and, since the late ’80s, has exhibited his work internationally. Group and duo presentations include Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of the earth), Centre Pompidou, Paris (1989); Worlds Envisioned: Alighiero e Boetti and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1994–95); Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, Queens Museum (1999); and The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994, P.S.1, Queens (2002), in addition to the Venice Biennale (2013). Among solo presentation of Bouabré’s work, in 1993, Portikus Frankfurt organized a major exhibition that traveled over the year to Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; and Ludwig Forum Aachen, Germany. In 2022, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presented his first survey. He died in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in 2014.