Malick Welli is a Senegalese artist working in photography, fashion, and spirituality. His work captures and represents the human condition, which he sees as a spiritual state marked by duality, contradiction, and introspection. A multidisciplinary practitioner, he draws a distinction between spirituality, something to be lived, and religion, something to be followed.

Welli’s scenes are carefully selected and composed with models, clothing, and colors chosen based on a specific context. They depict spiritual points of significance within particular communities. Techniques such as doubling and masking are used to signal spiritual presence, while the straightforward form of portraiture conveys intangible, ethereal content. Realism reveals and then unravels itself. Like the artist’s own journey of personal exploration and the resulting sense of estrangement from his cultural environment, his art diverges from the expectations placed upon it.

His work has been widely collected and exhibited. Selected exhibitions include 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York (2021), EXPO CHGO in Chicago, USA (2019), the Cairo Biennale in Egypt (2019), and AKAA (Also Known As Africa) in Paris, France (2018). His work was recently acquired by the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.