Senegalese sculptor Ndary Lo works to breathe new life into by-products, thus revealing the life cycle of materials. Often fashioning raw materials into natural forms, Lo is perhaps best known for his cast sculptures of willowy trees and lithe bodies. A Senegalese emblem foregrounded in the collective imagination of Africa, the tree is an essential symbol of life, nature and wisdom. In the 1920s, Alberto Giacometti and his contemporaries were influenced by African sculpture, now Ndary re-appropriates this cultural heritage. Works such as Lo’s Tree of the origins (2013–2015), consisting of tall and skeletal male figures and cast in Giacometti’s ashen tones, are rooted in legacy.

Lo was included in the itinerant exhibition, The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists (across 2014–2015 at MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, Germany; SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, the US; and the National Museum of African Art – Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the US).