Badara Ndiaye

Born in 1984 in Kaolack, Senegal, Badara Ndiaye develops an artistic practice that explores identity, transformation, and resilience as vital forces. Marked by decisive ruptures, his trajectory informs a body of work in constant motion, shaped by an approach rooted in upcycling.

 

His work asserts a humanist and engaged vision, giving form to the transformations that have shaped him. In 2024, his paintings were presented at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center (Pittsburgh, United States) as part of the exhibition XIPPI, Heritage, and Metamorphosis: Voices in West African Art.

 

Ndiaye’s early formation was shaped by sport, through a high-level basketball career in the United States. Gifted with an exceptional physical presence, he joined the Florida International Golden Panthers in Miami while pursuing studies in sociology, anthropology, and psychology, completed with honors. A serious knee injury brought this trajectory to an end, opening the way to a new space for reinvention.

 

He then turned toward fashion, approaching it as a visual and cultural language. As a model and artistic director, he has collaborated with fashion houses, international brands, and leading magazines, while also contributing to academic programs at renowned institutions, including the Parsons School of Design in Paris and New York. This immersion in the world of images has led him to conceive aesthetics as a tool for circulation between worlds, and transformation as a foundational principle of identity.

 

In parallel, Badara Ndiaye began painting directly onto his clothing and everyday objects, laying the foundations of a formative gesture: transforming in order to give new life. Today, his work takes the form of a hybrid practice in which painting, sculpture, and design engage in dialogue. Color—drawn from the red and ochre soils of Africa—operates as an energy, a flow, and a principle of construction and transmission. Acrylic paint breaks free from the frame to inhabit furniture and domestic space, unfolding in a gestural language that verges on expressionism.

 

Badara Ndiaye creates his own totems from found objects, sourced African masks, and natural elements gathered over time. His paintings, often executed on recycled wooden panels, are paired with refined, baroque frames collected in Palermo. These hybrid entities resemble painterly dreams—visual traps for the gaze where resemblance and seduction unfold—echoing Cobra, Dubuffet, and other constellations of modern art history. Africa also permeates his work through simple, restrained, and hieratic forms, sculpted entirely by hand. This is exemplified in his seats and tables made of raw wood coated in a deep black, through which he reinterprets the traditional African comb.

 

Art has become his privileged medium for expressing what has driven him since childhood: perseverance, curiosity, and a willingness to break with norms. Too tall to fit into predefined categories, Badara Ndiaye asserts himself through constant transformation—both in the representation of self and in artistic practice. As the narrator of his own story, he also speaks to his time, engaging with questions of memory, integration, self-awareness, and transmission.