António Ole
António Ole (b. 1951, Luanda) is one of the most significant figures in contemporary Angolan art. Working across installation, painting, sculpture, photography, and film, his practice reflects on the complexities of Angola’s colonial past, post-independence struggles, and urban transformation.
With a background in cinema and African-American culture from UCLA, Ole creates visual narratives that blend poetic reflection with political urgency. His use of found materials — drawn from Luanda’s musseques and everyday urban debris — gives form to structures of memory, resilience, and reconstruction.
Resisting fixed categories, his work moves between abstraction and figuration, ruin and renewal. For Ole, art is a space where the marginal becomes central — where fragments are reassembled into new forms of meaning, presence, and possibility.
