On the second floor of the Reina Sofía, in the very spot where Picasso’s Guernica was first exhibited when it arrived in the Madrid museum 34 years ago, there now hangs a smaller, near-namesake of the Spanish artist’s most famous work.
While African Guernica, which was drawn by the late South African artist Dumile Feni in 1967, may lack the scale of Picasso’s masterpiece, its depth, anger and unne...
The strongest version of this narrative is a deliberate and necessary corrective to the Eurocentric canon, using Picasso’s *Guernica*—a symbol of anti-fascist resistance—as a bridge to amplify marginalized voices. The exhibition’s framing is intellectually rigorous, acknowledging the circularity of influence (Picasso’s debt to African art, Feni’s engagement with European modernism) while avoiding reductive comparisons. It resists the temptation to force equivalence between the two *Guernicas*, i...