SIRIKI KY Burkina Faso, b. 1953

Born in 1953 in Treichville, Ivory Coast, Siriki Ky (SKY) studied at the School of Fine Arts in Abidjan and then at the Pietrasanta Academy of Arts in Tuscany, Italy before settling in Burkina Faso. Convinced that the artistic act is participatory, he works bronze in situ to allow visitors to observe its process. Anxious to perpetuate ancestral techniques, he made his works outside, cooked the moulds with wood fire and cast bronze in a traditional forge. 

 

There is always in the work of SKY, a pronounced emblematic side that refers to its African origins by conveying the traces of a thousand-year-old culture from which so many Western artists have drawn.

 

His transformations are expressive, his art is sometimes expressed in a rather barbaric way, he erases the anecdote or dilute it at the heart of the buried roots of his mythology which is jointly that of the history of his people whose essence he manages to revive. 

 

Siriki Ky is the creator of the Aongo International Granite Sculpture Symposium, initiator and curator of the sculpture symposiums of Ben Amira in Mauritania and Afrikabidon in Ardèche in France. Siriki Ky has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world and has participated in symposiums in Canada, France, Asia and Africa. He lives and works in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.