Chéri Samba was born on 30 December 1956 is a painter from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is one of the best known contemporary African artists, with his works being included in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
A large number of his paintings are also found in The Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC) of Jean Pigozzi. His paintings almost always include text in French and Lingala, commenting on life in Africa and the modern world. Samba lives in Kinshasa and Paris.
His father was a blacksmith and his mother a farmer. In 1972, at the age of 16 Samba left the village to find work as a sign painter in the capital of Kinshasa, where he encountered such artists as Moké and Bodo. This group of artists, including Samba's younger brother Cheik Ledy, came to constitute one of the country's most vibrant schools of popular painting.
In 1975 Samba opened his own studio. At the same time he also became an illustrator for the entertainment magazine Bilenge Info. Working both as a billboard painter and a comic-strip artist, he used the styles of both genres when he began making his paintings on sacking cloth. He borrowed the use of "word bubbles" from comic-strip art, which allowed him to add not only narrative but also commentary to his compositions, thus giving him his signature style of combining painting with text.
His work earned him some local fame. In 1979 Samba participated in the exhibition Moderne Kunst aus Afrika, organized in West Berlin. The exhibition was part of the program of the first festival Horizonte - Festival der Weltkulturen. Samba's breakthrough was the exhibition Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1989, which made him known internationally.
Samba's pieces aims to emphasize poverty about his culture, corruption, and chaos in his work. Samba says, “I appeal to people’s consciences…I paint reality even if it’s shocking, I put humor and color into it to attract people".
It explains how Samba believes that experience and process of sustaining and recreating a common identity across the African diaspora will show how to strengthen a community. He usually paints himself at the center of his visual social commentaries.