Massy Mampuya

Mampuya Mayimona, also known as Massy, is a self-taught visual artist, born in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Having been under the mentorship of renown artists such as Mukendi Bamwa, Achille Katemo and Patsheli Kahambo, Massy developed a passion for art and a determination to pursue it as his professional career. 

With a unique use of oil and acrylic colours on canvas, he expresses his creativity through a collaboration of photography and painting styles; using photographed images, transforming human figures into African traditional baskets, which in his view, the world is populated with baskets – humans. Traditional African baskets symbolise granaries, which as per a Congolese mythological meaning, would be the place of fertility. According to him, a granary head is symbolic of a place of knowledge that makes man and makes him exist, hence the saying: “knowing to exist”.