Emerging South African artist Mmangaliso Nzuza is set to present his first solo exhibition, titled "An Open Letter," at Southern Guild Cape Town.
Nzuza's paintings, rendered in sensuous oils, depict angular, figurative compositions that blend the familiar and the imagined. Exploring themes of community, subjectivity, and metaphoric harvest, the works draw on allegory, atmospheric color, and gestural mark-making.
Born in 1998 in Durban, Nzuza now lives and works in Cape Town. After returning from studying at the University of Edinburgh in 2022, he established a makeshift studio in his garage and began creating representational drawings in pencil and charcoal, before transitioning to the medium of oil painting.
Nzuza's immense canvases present cinematic moments of narrative ambiguity, with multiple bodies arranged in configurations that suggest community while evoking a sense of self-containment. In "An Open Letter," the artist transports his subjects outdoors, allowing them to expand beyond the politics of domestic spaces and find ease, pleasure, hope, and ritual in natural settings.
The artist's work has been compared to the rich pictorial language of renowned South African painter Peter Clarke, particularly in its energetic portrayal of the body. Nzuza's figures are self-defined, emanating a resolved self-determination with striking sincerity.
"An Open Letter" is rich in allegorical references, with bodies of water and fruit serving as metaphoric signifiers. Nzuza's dedication to experimental composition lends his figures a weighted, sculptural presence that seems to declare their rightful place in the world. In resisting specificity of place and subject, Nzuza's exhibition relies on exploratory form, sensory texturality, and color to create portals into universal emotional experiences.
The exhibition will be on view at Southern Guild Cape Town's Silo 5 location in the V&A Waterfront from August 29 to October 31, 2024.
For more information, please visit southernguild.com
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