LOUIS MAQHUBELA is one of the artists in THINKING, FEELING, HEAD, HEART
From December 2 until April 25, 2015
Curated by Marilyn Martin
The New Church Museum, 102 New Church Street, Tamboerskloof, Cape Town, 8001
About:
Louis Maqhubela was born 75 years ago in Durban, South Africa. His life under apartheid, against many odds, reached a moment of triumph when in 1967 he was hailed as the first black painter of distinction, winning first prize in the national Artists of Fame and Promise exhibition in the Adler Fielding Gallery. A bursary to Europe, further awards and successful exhibitions resulted in his eventual departure for London, where he has lived in voluntary exile since 1976.
Drift II, 2008.
This veteran South African painter blazed a trail, breaking away from the conventions of ‘township art’, to form a personal engagement with modernist abstraction. He developed a distinctive artistic language of his own – lyrical, spiritual and intensely expressive.
Several return trips to a newly democratic South Africa after 1994, and for his landmark retrospective exhibition in 2010, have had a powerful effect on Maqhubela. Formal references to Ndbele wall painting or to Zulu earplugs and youthful memories of rural and urban life, have re-entered his visual language, to great effect. There is evidence of this in recent works, such as the large canvas, Ostrich Dance, though the profound humanism and inner joy of his purely abstract painting remains a distinguishing feature.
Equilibrium 2000-2005.
Maqhubela’s work has entered the Iziko National Gallery of South Africa and Johannesburg Art Gallery collections, as well as the majority of corporate and public collections throughout South Africa. In London he is represented at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and in the USA by the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.
About the exhibition:
Transition, 2012.
The New Church Museum presents ‘Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart’, an exhibition of works from the permanent collection, engaging notions of abstract art.
The title, taken from Kevin Atkinson’s c.1976 painting, sums up the broad directions and possibilities of abstract art – cerebral, rigorous and calculated; visceral and expressionistic.
Considering abstraction in South African art is timely. Painting in general and abstraction in particular are being reconsidered and re-interpreted by longstanding practitioners, as well as a younger, dynamic generation.
Pondo Forms, 1996.
Tyilo-Tyilo, 1997.
www.thenewchurch.co