Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga

The first international monograph dedicated to Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, one of the most enterprising and exciting young artists working in Africa today.

Eddy Kamuanga’s large-scale figurative paintings display a wealth of historical understanding in a sophisticated interplay of strikingly colored forms juxtaposed on gray negative space.

Kamuanga’s work taps into the rich yet complex colonial history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC. His politically nuanced and culturally sensitive work explores the seismic shifts in economic, political, and cultural identity in the DRC since colonization. Increasingly globalized in outlook, many in the DRC today are rejecting their ancestral heritage in favor of modernity, a conflict that fuels Kamuanga’s work.
 
The DRC is the world’s largest exporter of coltan, a mineral critical to the production of computer chips and mobile phones. In all of Kamuanga’s works, t