Born in 1966 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Olga Yaméogo settled in France in the 1980s and now lives in Toulouse. As a self-taught artist, she initially worked privately, in order to free herself, to express her identity, to “create herself”, and not daring to share her artworks with others until the late 1990s. She “approached canvas and painting as a blank page, on which I was allowed to speak of myself and of the world”. Now a practicing art therapist, her art has become a true vehicle for introspection, as well as a medium for interrogating the dual cultures that have shaped her, between Burkina Faso where she grew up and France where she now lives as an adult. She eventually extricated herself from these questions of self-identity to produce a more universalistic art, dealing with the expression of emotions, migration and the body. She conceives her works in such a way that each and every one of us can identify with the content of her canvases.
The 2020 pandemic opened up a new phase of reflection for her. Using this period of isolation and anxiety as a catalyst, she explored themes such as relations with friends and family, as well as feelings of loss and melancholy. This work echoes the mixed emotions she had experienced when leaving Africa. Her practice re-examines issues around globalisation by examining migration from an individual perspective. She subverts pejorative views of migratory flows as carried out by an unknown and frightening crowd, by blurring their image in her paintings. At the same time, in her portraits she isolates some of her subjects in order to provide a singular and individual identity.
Olga Yaméogo held her first exhibition in France in 1999, in a group show at the Espace Saint-Jérôme in Toulouse. Since then, she has exhibited in Arles as part of the‘ Paroles Indigo’ series in 2012 and 2018, and in Paris at Art-Z in 2020 and Galerie 110 Véronique Rieffel in 2023. She has also taken part in the AKAA African contemporaryart and design fair in Paris in 2021 and the Dakar Biennale in 2022, both with Galerie Véronique Rieffel. In addition, she has gained recognition in Africa, with a residency in Côte d’Ivoire in 2022, as well as residencies in Senegal in 2022 and in 2024.
