Printmaking

The earlier works of Bambo Sibiya centralised the Black South African subculture of Swenking, that emerged in the 1970s, in response to rapid rural-urban migration during the apartheid era.  Swenking originates from an ancestral Zulu tradition of a cappella singing, known as ‘isicathamiya.’ 

The tradition  of Swenking later evolved into performative art displayed amongst migrant mineworkers in the city of Johannesburg, who emphasised township cultures of fashionable style and respectable gentlemen.

Bambo Sibiya is a South African art based in Johannesburg. Sibiya worked on the large-scale linocuts for several leading artists, such as William Kentridge, Diane Victor, Norman Catherine and Colbert Mashile. Sibiya was inspired by the scale and depth of these works to such an extent that he felt prompted to explore traditional printmaking techniques in his artistic practice.

Pauline Gutter creatively contends with a multitude of profound impressions of the human condition and unprecedented worldly encounters. The artwork of Gutter strikingly encompasses weighted themes of purgatory, the psychological and the prehistoric, which she most often conveys through still landscapes, dark animalistic imagery and a genre of subtlety shifting portraiture that is neither deformed nor formed. 

  Writing on Gutter’s exhibition titled Primordial (2021), in relation to the notion of the ‘sublime’, renowned South African art critic Ashraf Jamal writes that Pauline Gutter, “ungrounds the grounded surface of a canvas, foreshortens, expands, distorts, and, so doing, gropes deep within the innards of animality – the hidden and suppressed forces which are the greater and more fundamental ingredients of the Human.”

Pauline Gutter, born 1980, is a South African intermedia artist, based in the province of the Free State. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Fine Arts, obtained from the University of the Free State, for which she graduated cum laude in painting.

Diane Victor, born in Witbank in 1964, has established herself as a major figure in the South African and International art communities and is renowned for her expert printmaking and draughtsmanship. Victor positions herself within the South African art scene through her bold confrontations with difficult and at times taboo subject matter. 

In abstract paintings and prints, Mongezi Ncaphayi uses a wide range of materials to explore social questions of politics, power, and rampant inequities. Though the works often tread into such loaded territory, they remain beautiful abstract pieces of art. Ncaphayi’s use of thin washes of pigment recalls painters like Sam Francis while his rhythmically layered shapes and patterns invoke Julie Mehretu and Jessica Rankin.  Ncaphayi’s work has won him numerous honors across the globe as well as being a part of private collections.

Born in Zimbabwe, Tatenda Chidora is a fine art and fashion photographer. He photography at the Tshwane University of Technology. His contemporary style is representative of the global movement hailed as new African photography. He’s driven by creating a more diverse picture and inspired by the stories and faces of the African metropolis. For his portraiture, his subjects are often people he discovers on the street, finds interesting and enjoys the opportunity to engage with them. Together with Atelier le Grand Village he has embraced the medium of lithography to explore alternative textures to visualise his work with this new Postage Stamp series.

Evans Mbugua, born in Nairobi, Kenya, is a young visual artist-designer who pursued art studies in France where he obtained the Graphic Design diploma in 2005.  He has participated in international residencies and exhibitions and his works are in various private and public collections around the works including the Bibliohèque Nationale de France. For Mbugua, the human remains at the center of his artistic approach, regardless of the creative tool he chooses to express himself. He paints, photographs and films hope, the joy of life, love, pleasure, sharing, pride, emotions … staging his life. The diversity and cultural mingling of different peoples feeds his curiosity towards the world.