Libasse Ka’s paintings offer inventive solutions to thoroughly painterly problems. Take an untitled canvas from 2025, which features a dark silhouette of an umbrella that Ka painted on a piece of newspaper and then pressed onto the surface of his canvas, transferring the image before throwing the newspaper away. Painting the umbrella directly on the canvas “would have been too literal,” he explained when I visited his Brussels studio.
Ka’s works, with their pale surfaces, are mostly abstract, though oscillate between free gestures and recognizable forms—an umbrella, a car, a human in silhouette wielding a hammer, etc. They vary in size, with recent works tending toward larger canvases.
Ka’s unconventional approach took root in direct opposition to his training. He moved from Senegal to Belgium in 2010, and enrolled briefly in an art school in Brussels in 2019—L’École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre. But he left after just a few months, frustrated by its rigid conservatism.
Then, in 2023, his career took an unexpected turn while he was working at an electronics store, where he encountered the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo. Murillo recognized Ka’s talent immediately from images of paintings that the young artist showed on his phone, and offered him a stipend to paint full-time, allowing him to quit the electronics job and hone his practice. This connection led Ka to Vanessa Carlos, founder of Carlos/Ishikawa gallery in London, who soon began representing him.
Soon, Ka was exhibiting internationally, and last October at Art Basel Paris, Carlos/Ishikawa gave him a solo booth. This year, his first institutional solo will open at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Belgium.
Libasse Ka: Untitled, 2024.
Photo Damian Griffiths/©Libasse Ka/Courtesy Carlos/Ishikawa, London
When I visited Ka’s palatial apartment-studio in Brussels, I noticed painting and art books littering every surface. As he spoke about influences, he hesitated at my note-taking. “I don’t want to seem derivative,” he admitted. While echoes of Cy Twombly, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Sigmar Polke may be present, Ka’s paintings are more than the sum of their constitutive parts: They are chaotic yet fertile spaces for the emergence of something new and unexpected.
His studio was filled with large canvases dominated by shades of gray and beige. Yet despite their restrained palette, they each contain a rich diversity of marks and textures. Ka gestured toward a sticky, yellowed splotch on one painting and said, “it’s varnish,” inviting me to touch it. I could barely contain my exhilaration as I ran my hand over his work: His obviously tactile paintings are begging to be touched.
A series of drawings spread across his floor provided further insight into his thinking. One sketch depicted a knight driving a lance through a dragon, while a small cameraman lurked in the margins. “It changes the way you see it, right?” Ka chuckled. “Suddenly, it’s not just a battle—it’s a film set.” This subtle disruption of perception is present in his paintings too. There, Ka subtly responds to the omnipresence of the camera in modern life, imposing something both rugged and methodical instead—a refreshing contrast to the slick scroll of the social media feed.
