Masindi Mbolekwa
RESIDENT
Masindi Mbolekwa (b.2002) is a visual artist from Johannesburg. His practice is as an oil painter primarily. He is concerned with pictorial space and the ways in which it is utilized in the creation of a dialogue between metaphysical/abstract and material/representational realms.
Mbolekwa is an Honours graduate if the University of The Witwatersrand’s BA in Fine Art course (2023). He has participated in various group exhibitions including ‘Screen-In-Time' (2022), ‘What Comes First?’ (2022), ‘Siyabuka’ (2023), ‘Crossroads: Tsila Tse Pedi’ (2024) and ‘Figurative Frontiers’ (2024).
In the year 2024 Mbolekwa was featured in Wanted Magazine’s annual ‘Young and Vital’ artists list, and was the recipient of the senior residency of the artist collective Blvck Block. He has also tutored in the ‘Drawing and Contemporary Practice’ module of the Fine Arts course at the University of the Witwatersrand and completed an artist-led commission project with Rand Mutual Assurance.
Mbolekwa’s practice is a poetically loaded engagement with personal and cultural history and the ontology of natal alienation within a postcolony through the consideration of forms of earth as spiritual, and the use of abstract form, colour contrast, bodily gesture and archived knowledges as a language to communicate narrative and myth as well as facilitate emotive experience.
Artist Statement
“This practice is a poetic engagement with the self, a curated exchange of sign and stimuli between artwork and viewer. In my work I document and reflect though the careful union of painterly formalism and constructivist symbol-making, my personal experience of a socio- spiritual identity and the ways in which it is given form, and that form maintained within the systems, epistemes and spaces of a contemporary post-colony.
Informed by personal liminalities, the poetry of my work is somber and longing, it is stonelike yet confused, it allows itself to exist at the intersections of different lines of question than at the ends of any. I embrace UbuXhosa with a learned reverence, yet in the claiming of these customs I must face my relative lack of familiarity with them, I must feel the lineage and migrations that live in my veins, i must know the complexity of my present and status as umXhosa who is subject to a common postcolonial form of natal alienation, and endeavor for myself to affirm my ties to this identity.
Oil, Earth and Canvas earn great consideration in the way that they are arranged to maintain the painterly objecthood of the work, engage with the canon of painting and speak to the evocative yet otherwise incommunicable emotive fields of the Eros. Present yet invisible boundaries in my work are the subjects of questions on tradition and industry, about the real and the abstract, about the soil and the spirit, the land and the home, how history and archived knowledge live not in material itself but in its placement relative to other material.”
“I attempt with each work to explore the relationship that exists between representational symbology as the holder, communicator and jumbler of histories, contexts and canons; and the abstract form and texture as the driver of experiential engagement, as the page upon which language is encoded and read. Mirrored in this relationship are the conceptual forms that bind to material realities a corresponding ripple in the realm of the metaphysical. As fable reflects lesson, so too does object reflect void or the lack of form. On the canvas a sort of mapping of the real and abstract occurs, human figures and essential shapes fight to claim their place as subject. Two worlds and the crossing between each become – not in themselves, but in their relativity – a language of sorts, a dance of liminality, an always-almost, a rolling question. In this work I explore in the asymptotic attempt to merge and to map, the futility and necessity of these actions.
