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ABOUT

“African art is functional, it serves a purpose. It's not a dormant. It's not a means to collect the largest cheering section. It should be healing, a source a joy. Spreading positive vibrations.” - Mos Def 

Mos Def and happy art with meaning

Founded in 2012, Red Room gallery is a pioneering artistic platform upon which unique, contemporary African art is exposed to the greater international art market. The gallery seeks to source and display African works focusing primarily on artists from South Africa, providing them with a means to market and profit from their talent and personal brand. The art on show is anything but the clichéd generic trinkets one finds on the side of the road, but alluring representations of the realities of African people. It is not African art through a Western lens, but African art seen through African eyes. 

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Our work also prioritises artist development through the upliftment and promotion of an individual’s own exclusive brand. We provide opportunities for international exhibitions in Europe and the Middle East, where the demand for contemporary African art is highest, and establish sustainable business relationships with those artists whom we prize and support. Through this, we hope to expose the world to continental art that lives and breathes artistic life, and tells the stories of Africans both at war and at peace with their past. We seek to prove that contemporary African art need not be a mere representation of a continent seemingly succumbing to Western fetish. Red Room gallery strives to call and unite black African artists to create a market for their stories yet unheard. As the saying goes, ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’, a person is a person because of other people. 

The team with artists in the gallery
Life in the happy gallery with emerging artists

​© 2024 by Red Room Art (Pty) Ltd 

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