Gateja’s work is also very reminiscent of traditional African craftworks like basket and mat weaving. It must be a conscious choice for a goldsmith like himself who trained in Europe and comes back to search and discover better gold in traditional techniques that his forefathers perfected a long time ago. It is his way of keeping these practices alive but also adding his own spin to the magic.
For a long time, abstract work of African American artists was not popular. The art world and the market were not interested. Figuration dominated. That has changed.
Iyabanda Intsimbi / The metal is cold, the South African artist Cinga Samson’s solo exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, is composed of a series of (self)portraits and ‘private’ scenes that border on the ritual and funereal. Cinga’s portraits are pensive, sans pupil, cool and casual, confidently posing and adorned in gold. His dark palette of oils sinks his Black figures into ‘their’ world, threatening to disappear them into the Darkness that looms right behind
In the end I discovered a show making bold social commentary – speaking to the past, the contemporary and the future of Zambia, if not Africa.
The work on show is clearly the artist’s response to the covid-19 pandemic. The artist is among the few that have veered away from their usual themes in their works to tackle an immediate issue. He relays in the catalogue under the exhibition brief that when he was going through his sketch book at the beginning of the pandemic, he found sketches of figures wearing masks which he couldn’t remember where the inspiration came from.