View Askew: Africa, As Seen From Europe

“The first Europeans went [to Africa] to exploit the continent and were soon followed by artists excited by the ‘primitive’. But, as a new exhibition shows, the images they produced bear the stamp of colonialism with a paint brush… Our view of Africa has been an inheritance of 19th-century colonialism, dominated by biological determinism, by repressed and perverse sexuality, and by paintings and sculptures that ignored the realities of the place and time in favour of a romanticised and polemical vision.”