Ouattara Watts is a U.S. based artist born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Driven by a profound passion for visual culture, Watts devoted his formative years to deepening his artistic knowledge. This dedication would lead him to Paris, France, where he began his formal studies at l'École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Upon graduating he continued to develop the character of his work, soon attracting the attention of artists and collectors across the Atlantic including Jean-Michel Basquiat, who encouraged him to move to New York in 1988.

Now entering the fifth decade of his career, Watts has brought African spirituality, philosophy, and a depth of cultural insight together within an extensive body of work that attends to the artist’s interiority while aspiring towards the universal. His monumental paintings, drawings, and mixed media abstractions emerge from a transatlantic convergence of enigmatic ideograms. Broad painterly gestures cut through and embrace the anarchic landscapes at once, molding them into meditative spaces for invention. Each unfolds into a dynamic and ever-shifting universe of its own.

Ouattara Watts lives and works in New York and has participated in numerous exhibitions including Body of evidence at the National Museum of African Art, The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 at MoMa PS1, and Afriques Capitales at La Villette in Paris. His work has been displayed internationally at events such as the Venice Biennial (1993), Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002), the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London (2014), and the Dakar Biennial (2017). In 2018, he held his first personal exhibition in his native country, Before Looking at This Work, Listen to It, with Galerie Cécile Fakhoury.