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He is a master of naive painting and one of the great pioneers of modern African art. In bright colours and bold shapes, he brought the African cosmos - animals, people, myths - alive. 24 years ago, the Tanzanian Tinga Tinga artist Eduardo Saidi was killed by a police patrol in the centre of Dar es Salaam. Although until then he had only a single exhibition, the painter who had just turned 35 years old devolved after his death to a legend. The Tinga-Tinga-painting is one of the most important art movements of the black continent.

Seven representatives of this school are now on display in the ZAK Gallery. The doctor and African art collector Bernd Kleine-Gunk from Fürth brought the works of "Tinga Tinga scolars", which is also the title of the exhibition in Germany. Two-dimensional, without perspective and richly decorated with ornaments, they open up a brightly coloured universe of an exotic animal world - for European eyes it is like a glimps into a fairy tale book populated with elephants, giraffes, hippos, gnus, peacocks, butterflies, pelicans, parrots and brightly coloured fishes.

Gentle Humour

Further scenes come from daily African life: people working in the fields, while preparing a meal, the return of men from the hunt. The pictures, rich in content, naive charm and gentle humour tell stories and fascinate the viewer.

Here, the Tinga Tinga painters avoid by no means an uncritical view of an ideal world. In the spirit of their master, they bring into expression a piece of original Africa and cultural assertion. By confronting today's famine-stricken continent with a time in which man and his environment lived in harmony, the work could be by all means understood as social criticism.