KALAMA Akulez Henri (Lubumbashi (DRC), 1973, lives and works in Kinshasa (DRC)) The Spirit of Spring Oil on canvas. 100 x 100 cm. Signed and dated 2011 lower left. Director General/Chancellor of the Kinshasa Academy of Fine Arts, Kalama is an artist who sees painting as "his homeland". He takes a singular approach to art. He has set himself apart from the conformism of an artistic activity in the service of Congolese African authenticity, characterised by the reproduction of masks, ideograms and pictograms. This was in vogue in the Congolese pictorial landscape. Since the 1990s, he has been practising abstract art. He discovered in this practice a means of expressing and developing a passion for an artistic approach that is at once therapeutic, pragmatic and phenomenological. Francis Mampuya, a graduate of the Beaux-Arts, moves between semi-figurative and abstract styles. He exhibits mainly in Kinshasa, where he won first prize in an exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of independence. Known as a rebellious, non-conformist artist, he has become one of the most respected names in Congolese painting. His work has also been shown at the AKAA fair in Paris.