Gopal Dagnogo was in high school when he moved to France. He settled in Bordeaux where he continued to study and obtained a diploma in visual arts. After this period, he went back to Africa in 1997, first to Côte d’Ivoire and then to Burkina Faso. In Ouagadougou he learnt long standing traditional bronze techniques for three years. Enriched by this experience, Gopal returned to France, but this time to Paris. His painting uses a vibrant palette of colours in which the precise line gives life to hybrid still lifes composed of various objects referring to fragments of daily life. In this pile of objects, we can identify the double cultures of its creator. The empty bottles, gallinaceous birds and other animals evoke the streets of Abidjan, the silhouettes of Louis XV armchairs remind us of a Parisian bourgeois interior. Some objects, like pairs of sneakers, have a more ambiguous place, they do not belong to any specific imaginary but constitute a common imaginary, globalised. These objects tell the story of our time. Almost always, the human figure is absent from his canvases although humanity is the main subject.

Since 2010, Gopal has participated in numerous exhibitions globally. Recently, he participated in the 11th and 12th Dak’Art, Dakar (2014 and 2016), the 1st Biennial of Kampala (2014) and the 5th International Maiden Tower Art Festival, Baku (2014). Gopal has also been invited to various artist residency programmes, including Art Omi, New York (2014) and Montresso*, Marrakech (2019). Some of his works are in public and private collections, including the Lisser Art Museum in Sassenheim, the Netherlands.