Sam Nhlengethwa works with found printed images from posters and magazines, incorporating his recollections of township life in his imagery
The Pianist.
About:
Sam Nhlengethwa is one of South Africa’s foremost artists. Born in 1955, he studied at Rorke”s Drift and the Johannesburg Art Foundation. Sam Nhlengethwa was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year award in 1994, the year South Africa held its first democratic elections and freedom was won for all its people. He has successfully exhibited all over the world from Senegal to New York and Cologne, and his work is represented in major public and corporate art collections in South Africa and abroad.
Nhlengethwa was neither the first nor only artist in South Africa to use collage but it is the way that he uses the hard-edge cut shapes of ready-made images that is different and individual. Carefully selected reproductions from magazines are cut out and cut up and then juxtaposed to make new images, usually people or faces. Often these newly-constructed forms are combined with other media. What matters to Nhlengethwa is the content of the image and bits of paper were not often used as fillers or backgrounds. During the last few years Nhlengethwa has started working with the Artists’ Press using the photogravure process, because, among other features, he claims ‘it has an element of collage in it … it entails digitalising an initial collage’.
From the Jazz Series, 2002.
From the Jazz Series, 2002.
Nhlengethwa has grown and adjusted the style and content of his works post-Apartheid to explore other themes such as music, specifically jazz and the mechanics of everyday living. He works with found printed images from posters and magazines, incorporating his recollections of township life in his imagery.
Tribute to Basquiat, 2014.
Tribute to Romare Bearden, 2014.
By the time he started working with photogravure and lithographs Nhlengethwa had a well-established iconography but the new medium created a space for the urban artist to make multiples and develop series on selected themes. Among these are labour (Mine workers), political history (Glimpses of the Fifties and Sixties), interiors, music and the personal. In the series on jazz he brought the personal to the surface in terms of his affection for his brother and his love of this musical genre. He has commented that ‘when I do things about jazz it’s a tribute to my brother’.
{http://davidkrutprojects.com/artists/sam-nhlengethwa; http://www.revisions.co.za/biographies/sam-nhlengethwa/}
A Salad for Lunch, 2011.
Courtesy: Goodman Gallery SA.