Samuel Lemba

Samuel Lemba (°1999, Kinshasa, DR Congo) is a Liège-raised, Brussels-based multidisciplinary visual artist and painter. A graduate of La Cambre in Brussels, he was awarded the Fondation CAB Prize at La Cambre.

Lemba’s work bridges the ephemeral and the eternal. Through a distinctive fusion of spray paint, pigment and oil on canvas, he creates a vibrant tension between raw instinct and contemplative form. His work exists in a constant state between figuration and abstraction, representation and suggestion.

His painting practice develops at the intersection of several dimensions: the visible and the invisible, the spiritual and the material, as well as two distinct cultural worlds. This dual belonging creates a fertile tension within his practice, generating a continuous dialogue between different ways of inhabiting the world and perceiving its forces, presences and absences.

For Lemba, painting becomes a form of mediation — a space of passage between inner experience and the invisible dimensions he seeks to question. It is not merely a formal tool: it engages the body, gesture and a relationship to the sacred. Rather than representing what is visible, he seeks to open a path towards what escapes the image.

His work moves towards a place where the image dissolves, allowing another kind of presence or power to emerge.

“I do not paint what I see, but what needs to be made visible.”