Joseph Ntensibe

Ugandan artist Joseph Ntensibe has made it his life’s work to lean into his very real concerns about the diminishing forests of his youth. Born in 1953, the Uganda of his childhood has changed beyond measure thanks to rampant deforestation due to mining, war, drought, urbanisation and ignorance regarding the value of what was once one of Uganda’s most prolific resources. In the past twenty years alone, the equatorial East African country has lost over 1 million hectares of virgin forest cover – almost 30% of the country’s total land.

While he is a highly collectable artist, it is not easy to procure Ntensibe’s large scale canvasses and they are regarded as rarities on the contemporary art market. Consequently, an opportunity to collaborate with and showcase this extraordinary piece, from the much-celebrated ‘Disappearing Forest’ series, is a great privilege for Christopher Moller Gallery.

Ntensibe’s dreamlike forest scenes glimmer and shimmer with hidden sources of light; they are multicolored sensory feasts that have been likened to Cezanne and Klimt for their luminosity, but like other devotees, we believe this artist-activist’s work is in a league of its own. The ever-changing landscape of the series is profound and a devastatingly poignant timeline of Uganda’s loss. In recent years, critics have noted how for the first-time, glimpses of sky (unheard of in a true equatorial rain forests) and much more shafts of light have crept in to Ntensibe’s forestscapes; while there is no denying how beautiful the depiction, it is laced with a sense that we are bearing witness to a living tragedy.