HECHICERO, NO... SABIO || Poen de Wijs

Poen de Wijs

Poen de Wijs (Dutch artist) 1948 - 2014
Medicijnman bij Gedi (Witch Doctor), 1996
watercolour and oil on panel
45 x 60 cm.
signed Poen de Wijs
private collection

Gede (also known as Gedi) is a village on the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya, lying south of Malindi and north of Watamu. The Ruins of Gedi are located there. Although not thought to be mentioned in historic sources, extensive ruins of a former port have been dated to the thirteenth century or earlier, including a tomb with a date corresponding to 1399, until at least the seventeenth century. Later, the port was abandoned and not rediscovered until the 1920s.
The buildings are of coral, earth and plaster, some with designs inscribed. They include a mosque, palace, houses and tombs as well as a fort. The style is classified as Swahili architecture.
The modern village is home to a museum and a butterfly house.
Gede is part of the Malindi District and it has an urban population of 600.

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Poen de Wijs as a person and as an artist goes through a period of great inspiration. Since his recent trips to Kenya, his paintings have become the magical meeting places of European and African female figures. De Wijs integrates their experience frameworks, and creates a harmony of colour and form, in which races and cultures thrive together. A world in which the singularity of the African individual is calibrated on an equal footing to that of the European. Art collectors and admirers of Poen de Wijs know that this highly topical theme had already begun in his previous collection "The Three Graces". The "Kenya-series" is a further deepening of this.

Text: Piet Bogaards at exhibition in Gallery De Twee Pauwen - 1996