Romuald Hazoumè

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Romuald Hazoumè. Working across numerous mediums, Hazoumè engages with the postcolonial legacies and contemporary realities that define his native Benin. Les fleurs du mâle is the artist’s first exhibition in Greece and features paintings, sculptures, and photographs produced over the past two decades.

Hazoumè transforms discarded industrial objects into anthropomorphic sculptural assemblages. In sculptures of singular masks, he composes plastic containers and appliance parts into faces, and nylon, fishing nets, feathers, and additional materials into hair, clothing, and other markers of style and individuality. In doing so, he draws on Yoruba culture and pan-African traditions, evoking their sacred and performative significance while bringing a critical gaze to the enduring global fascination with African mask-making.

The incisive visual reconfigurations of these works are complemented by the wordplay of their titles. The exhibition’s title, Les fleurs du mâle, hinges on the distinction between mal (evil—alluding to Charles Baudelaire’s 1847 volume of poetry, Les fleurs du mal) and mâle (male). As Hazoumè remarks: “Many of the problems in the world today are created by men. The wars and current conflicts are caused by men who do harm to their people. And we are supposed to agree with them, to consider their insults and their bombs as flowers. But they are not flowers.”