Sambo Boly was born in Sabce, Bam Province in Burkina Faso. Boly learned drawing during his Koranic studies, then painting at the Centre National d'Artisanat d'Art in Ouagadougou. He has exhibited in Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, France, and Switzerland, and was one of the artists selected for the exhibition of Burkinabe art at the Center Culturel Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris during the Sommet de la Francophonie in 2004. The particularity of Boly’s work lies in its profound sense of freedom. His work covers the entire fabric of humanity: human forms, hybrids, simple heads, ancestor spirits, jinns and totems, in a style that oscillates between symbolic abstraction and narrative figuration. Sambo Boly is a storyteller; he tells stories inspired by everyday life and is always interested in the moral of the story. His paintings comment on societal power, authority, fear, pettiness, cowardice, and pretense, and are steeped in the wisdom of African proverbs.
