Malick Welli is a Senegalese artist who works in photography, fashion, and spirit. His work captures and represents the human condition, which for him, is a spiritual condition of duality, contradiction, and the path of self-questioning. The multi-disciplinary adept differentiates spirituality, something to be lived, from religion, something to be followed.

Deeply researched, Welli’s scenes are carefully selected and composed with models, attire and color chosen for a context and feature landmarks of spiritual significance of a given community. Doubling and masking serve to signify spiritual presence; the prosaic form of the portrait projects an ethereal content.

The realism betrays and undoes itself. Much like the artists’ love of self-inquiry and the resulting alienation from his own cultural surroundings, the art estranges itself from the expectations placed upon it.

Welli’s works have been widely collected and exhibited. Selected exhibitions include 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, New York (2021), EXPO CHGO, Chicago, USA (2019), Cairo Biennale, Egypt (2019), AKAA (Also Known As Africa) fair, Paris, France (2018). His work has recently been acquired by the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin, USA.