Foreign Agent is a young contemporary art gallery based in Lausanne, Switzerland, showcasing emerging and established contemporary artists and designers mainly from Africa and the Diaspora in a uniquely curated  environment. Come visit our Salon Africain featuring exclusive Yinka Ilori fibreglass furniture! We organise 6 shows per year at the gallery, as well as thematic on-line viewing rooms and shows (mainly on Artsy) and soon we’ll take part in our first international art fair: The Solo Project in Brussels. We are also engaged in active collaborations with selected galleries and platforms, such as The Photographic Collective. Foreign Agent is also the Big Brother of Little Agent, a concept store with unique and carefully selected must-have pieces which will elevate your global style.

Foreign Agent is currently presenting Superlife, Maurice Mboa’s first solo in Switzerland since 2017. Superlife showcases the artist’s exploration of organic life: the celebration of a supernatural life force which exceeds the human, the animal and the vegetal and survives in all living beings beyond the body and after death, an enigmatic and charismatic substance carried through time and space. Most of the works presented here were made by the artist after a recent life-changing collapse in 2020 which required open-heart surgery, an operation during which he almost died and floated out of his body: a borderline experience which opened the artist’s eye to the finitude of the body and the eternal life of the soul.

The world of Superlife is populated with radical beings as archaic as they are futuristic. These supreme creatures are portrayed with signature streaked metallic faces, which index an archetypical individual faceprint – or rather a “soulprint” specific to the artist’s cosmogony. They pose in their primeval habitat reminiscent of a vibrant primordial forest full of dense mysterious foliage, faceless but definitely watching us – looking into us – often with a curious head tilt as if perplexed by our presence or attempting to seduce us, animated by intimate fluid vibrations. Their hands often bizarrely twisted – presenting? offering? receiving ? – gesturing as if they were trying to tell us something in an otherworldly sign language, beckoning us into their alien microcosmos. Every detail seems to signify something we can’t fully comprehend, compounding the ontological singularity and otherness of these mysterious figures – their superhuman quality.

Foreign Agent. Live bold.