George Lilanga


George Lilanga was a Tanzanian artist. He was of the Makonde people and lived in Dar es Salaam. His work was exhibited in international expositions of African contemporaries including Africa Remix in Düsseldorf, Paris, London and Tokyo. He worked in the Makonde artistic tradition of carving wood and later began painting, he would largely be known for his stylistic figural figures.

Biography

The exact place and date of Lilanga's birth are unknown although he said that he was born in 1934 in the village of Kikwetu, Masasi district, in the Mtwara Region of southern Tanzania.
cultural centre in Dar es Salaam has decorations by Lilanga
Lilanga's parents were both Makonde. His father was an agricultural labourer who worked on the sisal plantations and he had two brothers who died before him. His father left the family and married another woman. Lilanga and his family later moved to the city of Lutamba, in southern Tanzania, on the border with Mozambique.
Here Lilanga went to grammar school for four years. Lilanga, in the works of his last years of life, which were dedicated to village life, returned many times to the representation of the happy moments when grammar and secondary school students received their diplomas.
In 1970 Lilanga decided to move to Dar es Salaam, where there were greater opportunities for selling sculptures.
In 1971, Lilanga got his first job, thanks to his uncle, Augustino Malaba, an already well-known sculptor who would be his future collaborator. He worked as a night guard at the House of Art, a typical African center for the development of art and craftsmanship. Lilanga's talents were soon recognized by Jean Pruitt. Lilanga welcomed to Nyumba ya Sanaa to join other artists like Robino Ntila, Augustino Malaba and Patrick Francis Imanjama. He began to create batiks, works on goatskin and on sheets of iron for the finishing of railings and gates.
Lilanga frequented the art circles of the Tingatinga school. Around 1972 he became essentially a painter. Some of his works were presented at Dar es Salaam's National Museum in 1974.
In 1977, he made his first journey outside Africa, travelling to New York, where he had a show at the Marycoll Ossing Center. He stayed for a brief time in Manhattan, selling prints made on paper or cardboard, standing on street corners.

Health

In 1974, he was diagnosed with diabetes mellitus. "I was always very tired, unable to follow my normal daily routine. Therefore, I decided to go in for a complete checkup in the local hospital. On that occasion, the doctors determined that I had diabetes."
In the late 1990s, his diabetes worsened with severe complications. Lilanga was forced to reorganise his work, putting together an atelier that included numerous young pupils and his own relatives who were also sculptors and painters. They were closely supervised by Lilanga, and began to take over part of the work that Lilanga could no longer easily do by himself.
In 2000, the combination of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease led to a rapid deterioration in Lilanga's health. Due to gangrene, in October 2000 his right leg had to be amputated. In December of that year, the left leg was also amputated. Lilanga thus had to use a wheelchair; but after returning to his home in January 2001, he resumed his work.
In 2001, due to his serious physical impairments, he returned to small works with ink on paper and small goatskins 22.5 x 22.5 cm in size, which could be done more quickly and easily. With the assistance of his atelier, however, he also continued to create paintings of considerable size, and until shortly before his death, he produced large canvases, Masonites and tondos.
Lilanga died on Monday 27 June 2005, in Dar es Salaam, in his house-atelier at Mbagala.

Artistic Practice & Success

Shortly after beginning grammar school Lilanga had his first contact with sculpture, working in the Makonde tradition. He dedicated himself almost exclusively to this technique from 1961 until 1972. He showed his first works to Europeans who worked in the refugee camps during Mozambique's war of independence. Following their advice, in 1970 Lilanga decided to move to Dar es Salaam, where there were greater opportunities for selling sculptures.
In 1978, he participated in a collective exhibition of African artists in Washington D.C. Of the 280 works presented, about 100 were by Lilanga. It was on this occasion that he was compared with Jean Dubuffet. Lilanga was considered to have had an influence on the young American graffiti artists. Lilanga began a long series of exhibitions. His works had increasing success in Africa, Europe, the US, India and Japan.
In the 1980s Lilanga participated a few times in Salzburg Summer Academy. There he learned to produce etching works which became to an important basic for his later coloured art works. Subsequently he dedicated himself almost exclusively to painting. His Shetani were represented two-dimensionally on Masonite, canvas, batiks and goat skin frames.
In the 1990s his works became increasingly larger. During this period, after a break of many years, at the end of the 1990s he began working intensely again with sculpture, creating a large number of works in soft wood, vividly coloured with oil-based enamels.

Legacy

George Lilanga's colourful artworks underscore a whimsical evolution from traditional Makonde art, which is the source of the shetani fantastic creatures depicted in virtually all of Lilanga's paintings and sculptures. Traditionally, Makonde sculptors choose the finest woods for their pieces and would frown upon painting over the woods' natural textures. The bright enamel multi-colour painting technique pioneered by Lilanga gives his pieces a more contemporary aesthetic appeal and a unique style that has made them popular with collectors and art dealers. As a result, Lilanga became a reference in African art and enjoyed considerable commercial success in the latter part of his life; prices for his pieces were further boosted after his death in 2005.
However, many pieces have been attributed by gallerists to George Lilanga based solely on their 'Lilangalike' appearance. Because pieces sold as 'Lilangas' number in the many hundreds it stands to reason that George Lilanga could not possibly have crafted them all himself, in particular in view of his frail health during the last decade of his life when the bulk of such pieces was produced.
The reality was that George Lilanga mentored and inspired several artists who worked with him and capitalized on the value of the 'Lilanga' label. After George Lilanga's death, several of those artists and new ones continued to produce under the Lilanga attribution.

A lot of George Lilanga's lifetime art works can be found in leading international collections like The Contemporary African Art Collection of Jean Pigozzi and Hamburg Mawingu Collection HMC of Peter-Andreas Kamphausen. Directly after the death of the artist the HMC: George Lilanga Collection has presented in a work directory for the first time a systematically and thematically complete summary of Lilanga's work. In addition, the book explores the traditional roots of East African Makonde art as well as four decades of Lilanga's artistic development with different materials and techniques including sculpture, paintings, etchings, drawings and metal works. Currently the HMC publish the as an online blog with information about the artist, his art works, exhibitions and other interesting background material. Also in 2005 the African Collection series published a well-illustrated book on Lilanga's work with useful information.

Exhibitions

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