Christine Ankaoua
at the London Art Fair 2025
London Art Fair 2025
22 - 26 January 2025
VIP Preview 21 January 2025
Business Design Centre
52 Upper Street
N1 0QH
London​
Christine Ankaoua’s (b. 1945) career spans nearly four decades, which saw her exhibit in museums and galleries around the world. Displaying a distinctive mastery of colour, Ankaoua’s creations have established her since the 1980s as one of the leading figures of abstract art in France. Ankaoua’s career has relied only upon her instinct and personal approach to painting - for Christine, ‘being an artist means constantly living in a dream, and from that dream, building something.’ Following her studies at the American Center in Paris in 1984-85, she quickly gained success, participating in the Génie de la Bastille and discovered by Alain Dominique Perrin, who set up the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain. She exhibited several times at the FIAC (the forerunner of Art Basel Paris) and collaborated on a high profile UNESCO project in the 1990s. Art critic Yves Michaud said of her 'Ankaoua's monochrome is worked, researched, nuanced: the colour is deep and rich, the result of a sedimentation of moments.'
Selected artworks
Despite this illustrious career, her extensive body of work is largely out of the public eye today - a fate that has befallen many women artists of her generation. Ankaoua has shown her work in over 40 exhibitions worldwide across France, of course, but also further afield, in Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Poland, Caracas and beyond. She moved in prominent artistic circles throughout her career, Ankaoua crossing paths with some of the most influential figures of her time, including James Baldwin (she was with him when he was made a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur in France), with the then Mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, and guitarist Manitas de Plata as can be seen in the photographs below.
Over the past three years, ArtULTRA has worked hard to reframe and reintroduce Christine in the contemporary landscape through various forms of presentation of her work. As a first step, after nearly two years of detective work and research, ArtULTRA commissioned and designed a comprehensive monographic publication of Ankaoua, with the help of French photographer Louis Delbarre, and book designer Carolina Semprucci. In 2025, Christine will turn eighty, and to mark this special occasion ArtULTRA will show a curated selection of Christine’s work as its debut at the London Art Fair’s Encounters section. Paired with the works of emerging figurative painter Beatriz Santos, the two artists will be dialoguing across genres and generations.