Audrey d’Erneville, Artist & Art Director, was born in Paris but made the world her home. Currently living between Dakar and Los Angeles, she also spent some of her childhood in South Africa, and strives to create work that is as rich and colorful as her cultural background. This transnational upbringing has profoundly shaped her artistic practice. Her work carries the visual energy of Senegal’s urban culture while maintaining a distinctly contemporary graphic sensibility shaped by her training in design.
A Visual Language Rooted in Dakar
The visual rhythm of Dakar is central to d’Erneville’s work. The city’s streets—alive with color, signage, and improvisational design—form a rich visual archive that she translates into her paintings and illustrations.
Elements such as the iconic car rapides (the brightly painted minibuses that move across Dakar), hand-painted barber shop signs, textiles, and urban typography appear throughout her compositions. These everyday graphics, often overlooked as ordinary street culture, become powerful aesthetic references in her work.
Rather than treating these visual elements as nostalgic artifacts, d’Erneville reinterprets them through a contemporary lens. Her compositions often combine bold color palettes, layered typography, and graphic forms reminiscent of posters, album covers, and editorial design. This synthesis reflects her background in graphic design, where layout, composition, and typographic structure play a central role in visual storytelling.
Between Graphic Design and Painting
Trained in graphic design and with more than a decade of professional experience across creative industries, d’Erneville approaches painting with a designer’s sensibility. Her works often feel structured like visual narratives: carefully arranged compositions where typography, illustration, and color interact as equal elements.
This cross-disciplinary approach places her work within a broader movement of African artists who blur the boundaries between fine art and graphic culture. Rather than separating illustration, design, and painting into rigid categories, artists like d’Erneville treat them as interconnected visual languages.
Her work reflects a broader tradition in Senegal where graphic expression has long played a central role in public visual culture—from street murals and signage to political posters and fashion graphics. In this sense, d’Erneville’s practice situates itself within an evolving lineage of African visual communication.
radition and Contemporary Culture
Another recurring dimension in d’Erneville’s work is the tension between tradition and modernity. Her imagery frequently combines historical references with contemporary visual aesthetics, reflecting the layered temporalities present in cities like Dakar.
In exhibitions such as Tradition & Transmission, her work explores how cultural heritage is preserved, transformed, and reinterpreted across generations. The paintings function almost like visual storytelling—similar to the role of a griot—bridging past narratives with contemporary life.
This interplay between memory and modernity is central to many contemporary African artistic practices. Rather than treating tradition as static, artists like d’Erneville reveal it as something dynamic—constantly evolving as it moves through new contexts and media.
Expanding Creative Practice: Chez Awa
Beyond her studio practice, d’Erneville is also the founder of Chez Awa, a lifestyle and apparel brand that extends her visual language into everyday objects.
The brand draws inspiration from West African aesthetics and collaborative creative networks across the continent. Its name pays homage to the historic Senegalese feminist magazine Awa: La Revue de la Femme Noire, founded by a group of African women that included her great-aunt, the pioneering journalist Annette Mbaye d’Erneville.
Through Chez Awa, d’Erneville bridges art, design, and cultural production—demonstrating how visual culture can circulate beyond gallery spaces into fashion, publishing, and everyday design.
Exhibitions and Recognition
In recent years, her work has been increasingly visible in international art contexts. Her paintings were presented in the Paris exhibition “L’année d’après” during the Génération A festival associated with Saison Africa 2020. She has also participated in major cultural events in Senegal, including exhibiting a large-scale painting during the Dakar Biennale, one of Africa’s most important contemporary art gatherings.
These exhibitions reflect the growing global interest in artists working at the intersection of African urban culture, design, and contemporary art.
A Contemporary Senegalese Pop Aesthetic
Ultimately, Audrey d’Erneville’s work proposes what could be described as a Senegalese pop aesthetic—a visual language rooted in the textures of Dakar while resonating with global graphic culture.
Her paintings operate simultaneously as cultural archives, graphic experiments, and portraits of diasporic identity. Through color, typography, and stylized figures, she constructs images that capture both the vibrancy of Senegalese urban life and the complex cultural networks that connect Africa to its global diaspora.
In doing so, d’Erneville contributes to a growing movement of artists redefining how African visual culture is represented in contemporary art—where street graphics, design history, and personal memory converge into a powerful and unmistakably modern aesthetic.
