Eli Made

Presentation

Born December 29, 2003 in Bukavu (DRC). Lives in Kinshasa. Eli Made - real name Elie Mafundwe - grew up in Bukavu. A gifted draughtsman, he exhibited here and there in his hometown while still a teenager, before moving to Kinshasa in 2022. A fan of the tie-and-dye technique on T-shirts using bleach, Eli realized one day, towards the end of 2022, that this technique could be exploited for artistic production. He bought some black fabric and began “painting” on it with a brush dipped in bleach. He published on the networks and met Angalia, who soon afterwards exhibited and sold one of his very first works in Paris. Eli was 19 at the time. His paintings are portraits of psychological states: suffering, inner struggle, meditation, mental transformation, resilience and so on. This universe refers to his personal experience, particularly to a complicated period in his life that he managed to get through on his own, thanks to the Internet, or rather thanks to his extraordinary capacity for self-training and analysis. Self-taught (Eli spent just a few months at the Kinshasa Academy of Fine Arts), in just a few months at the age of 20 he forged an absolutely unique artistic signature.