Esther Mahlangu "Reacquiring"
Kyle Kauffman Gallery
This event has ended.
Widely regarded as the most important Ndebele artist working today, Esther Mahlangu was the first to transfer Ndebele designs onto canvas. Traditionally, Ndebele painting is executed in large scale, colorful, geometric murals exclusively reserved for the exterior of domestic buildings. "Reacquiring" is a survey of her most recent body of work. This latest exhibition will include a wide range of media: paintings, beadwork and sculptural objects. Chronologically, it begins with the finest examples of Mahlangu’s flat paintings - boards and canvases elaborately decorated in either bright commercial acrylic or muted natural pigments of cow dung and mud, utilizing only feathers and bundled-twigs as brushes. However, the focus of the exhibition is her most recent series of sculptures: contemporary objects such as trucks and signs, meticulously embellished in traditional Ndebele fashion. These objects - juxtaposing the old and the new, the abstract and the representational, the traditional and the contemporary - are the paradigmatic examples of the way in which her oeuvre is constantly evolving, breaking from convention and challenging the strictures of a customary art form.
[Image: Esther Mahlangu "Untitled" (2004) Acrylic on board 12 x 16 in]
Media
Schedule
from March 27, 2008 to May 10, 2008