Babacar Sow

Life and work

Babacar Sow was born on 20 January 1990 in Saint Louis, in northern Senegal, and works as a visual artist in paper collage. His subject is the portrait: African women, men and couples, built up from cut and assembled paper rather than drawn or painted, with the texture of the assembled fragments deliberately left visible. He describes the practice as a way of holding together identity, collective memory and the histories of the continent, and the faces are handled with a formality that reads as tribute rather than as reportage. He is represented exclusively by the LYNART Store gallery in Paris, which issues his editions and sells them internationally. He is early in his career and the public record on him is correspondingly short.

Disciplines and how they differ

Two different objects come to market under this name. The first is unique work: collage and mixed media on paper, and painting on canvas. These are one of a kind and they are what the higher results at LLB Auction have been paid for, an oil on canvas of 2022 and a painting of 2019. The second is the editioned print: colour screenprints on Canson paper, some finished with diamond dust, issued square at sixty by sixty or fifty five by fifty five centimetres in editions of five or ten, signed, and sold new by his gallery. Two of those editions have passed through this house. The unique works and the editions sit in bands an order of magnitude apart, so the medium line in a catalogue entry is the single most important thing to read.

What a specialist examines

Whether the sheet is a unique collage or a screenprint of one. That distinction is easy to lose in a photograph, because the editions reproduce collage surfaces and diamond dust reads as texture on a screen. In the hand a collage has physical edges where paper meets paper, and the layers throw small shadows; a screenprint is flat beneath the dust. Then the numbering. The published editions are very small, so a fraction such as one over five should be legible in the margin, written by hand, next to the artist's signature. Sheet size is diagnostic, since the editions are square at fixed dimensions. On the unique works look for the signature and any date on the face and on the reverse, and establish the support, canvas or paper. Because the work is recent and was mostly bought new, an invoice usually exists and should be produced. No body reviews works under this name for sellers.

Market position

This research found no public auction record for the artist outside LLB Auction. He has not been offered at Christie's, Sotheby's, Phillips or Bonhams. What exists instead is a primary market: the gallery that represents him exclusively sells the editions new from Paris, and the unique works come from the studio. That is a description of where the artist stands rather than a judgement on the work. It means comparables are thin, that an estimate on a consignment will lean on this house's own results and on the gallery's published prices, and that a buyer is taking a position on an artist whose secondary market is still forming.

What a seller should have ready

The invoice or receipt from the gallery or from the studio, which for an artist at this stage is the strongest document available and often the only one. Photographs of the face taken in raking light, which will show whether the surface is built from layered paper or printed flat. The reverse in full. Exact dimensions in centimetres. The edition fraction and the signature photographed close enough to read. The year, which the artist carries in the title of most published works. And any correspondence about where the work came from, because with a public record this short every piece of documentation counts for more than it would under an established name.