Themba Tsotsi writes about the work of the South-African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere. Starting point are two exhibitions of Wa Lehulere at Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town: Here I am, a concrete man throwing himself into abstraction (2017) and To whom it may concern (2015).
I want to continue using my work to empower, to heal and transform lives and to show how that worked for me and how that could be an aesthetic strategy for helping others. I intend to continue questioning the relationship between Africa and the West: where are we going, what are we doing? I also want to support my community to share what I learned and be an example for people who are marginalized based on identity.
I was grieving the loss of a close friend and during one of their wakes, I heard someone say that my friend was lucky because she had left all of the weight of the world behind. That got me thinking. What if that’s not true. What if some of this baggage follows us to the other side. That was the seed of the story and we developed the world from there with my co-writer Mugambi Nthiga.
My criteria for choosing the artists on the list has included how long they have been practicing professionally, how active they are in terms of showing their work, sales of their work, strength and maturity of their concepts, aesthetics and technical competence, value at auction, novelty and the avant-garde factor in their work, personal taste, among many others.
“My understanding of painting is the language of abstraction, and by abstraction I mean a world of ideas, a world of complex thoughts, a world of imagination. I believe that a descriptive approach is actually arming a subject. The more it is defined, the more it is reduced. Trying to stay open, works better for me when it comes to create strong links with reality, with facts, with my understanding of what it is to paint. …”