Contemporary African Artist
Boris Anje is a contemporary African artist, based between Cameroon and Europe, whose work examines identity, elegance, and self-fashioning through the visual and cultural codes of La Sape.
Works from €2,800 – €16,000
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Lives and works in Douala - Cameroon
African Sartorial Imaginaries
Boris Anje (ANJEL) is a Cameroonian contemporary artist whose practice operates at the crossroads of painting, fashion and cultural critique. Born in Cameroon, he received rigorous academic training in drawing and painting at the Institute of Fine Arts in Foumban, where he completed a Professional Bachelor’s degree in 2015 and a Master’s degree in 2018. This formal grounding continues to shape the technical precision and compositional clarity of his work. Today, Anje is recognised internationally as a leading Cameroonian painter within the field of African contemporary art.
At the heart of Anje’s practice lies a sustained exploration of African sartorial culture and the symbolic power of dress. Drawing inspiration from La Sape—the Congolese philosophy of elegance and self-staging—he foregrounds the figure of the African dandy as a cultural and political agent. In his work, style functions as a form of resistance and self-definition, challenging inherited narratives around Black visibility, colonial legacies and global consumer culture. Through these figures, Anje examines how African fashion and identity operate as tools of dignity, imagination and social commentary.
Working across painting and silkscreen, Anje develops a visual language often associated with neo-pop painting, marked by bold chromatic contrasts, meticulous detail and layered symbolism. Clothing, accessories and graphic motifs drawn from both luxury fashion and everyday urban life become narrative structures within his compositions. These elements allow the body to function simultaneously as portrait, archive and canvas—an arena where personal aspiration and collective history intersect. His work offers a critical yet celebratory vision of African dandies, repositioned as thinkers, dreamers and protagonists of their own image.
Anje has exhibited extensively across Africa, Europe and North America. Recent solo exhibitions include SAPOLOGY. Never Stop Dreaming at OOA Gallery, Barcelona, A Decade of Imprints in Dakar, and In the Body of a Woman in Brussels. His work has also been presented in major group exhibitions and international platforms, including museum contexts in Cape Town and the Netherlands, as well as leading fairs such as 1–54 Contemporary African Art Fair and ArtX Lagos. His paintings are held in significant private and institutional collections worldwide, spanning museums, foundations and international banking collections.
Situated within a new generation of artists redefining contemporary painting, Boris Anje occupies a distinctive position in African contemporary art, where elegance, politics and visual power converge on a global stage.
SAPOLOGY, Boris Anje’s current exhibition at OOA Gallery.
View all artists represented and collaborating with OOA Gallery.
