Nicholas Hlobo | Yongamela Ubumnyama | 2022
Yongamela Ubumnyama marks Nicholas Hlobo’s first exhibition with Goodman Gallery, featuring new work that explores a shift from minimal use of acrylic paint to a less inhibited approach, incorporating the unwieldy medium with signature materials ribbon and canvas.
Hlobo is known for creating hybrid objects, intricately weaving ribbon and leather into crisply primed canvas alongside wood and rubber detritus. Each material holds charged associations with cultural, gendered, sexual and national identity, creating a complex visual narrative that references ideas around postapartheid nationhood and bodily healing.
Using the metaphor of himself as a surgeon, Hlobo treats the canvas like a physical being, ready to be cut open and sewn up at his discretion. For this latest series, Hlobo embraces acrylic paint as a primary material in his toolbox, continuing to sculpt the canvas with multicoloured stitching but alongside bold streaks of paint.
Artworks
About
Nicholas Hlobo
Nicholas Hlobo (b. 1975, Cape Town, South Africa. Lives and works in Johannesburg) began his career around the end of apartheid in 1994, when there was a new sense of freedom and national pride in South Africa. With the eradication of legalised and enforced discrimination and segregation, Hlobo and his peers were empowered to openly voice their opinions and ideas under the protection of these new laws. Hlobo’s subtle commentary on the democratic realities of his home country and concerns with the changing international discourse of art remain at the core of his work. Using tactile materials such as ribbon, leather, wood, and rubber detritus that he melds and weaves together, Hlobo creates intricate two- and three-dimensional hybrid objects. Each material holds a particular association with cultural, gendered, sexual, or ethnic identity. Together, the works create a complex visual narrative that reflects the cultural dichotomies of Hlobo’s native South Africa as well as those that exist around the world. His evocative, anthropomorphic imagery and metaphorically charged materials elucidate the artist’s own multifaceted identity within the context of his South African heritage.
Hlobo received a fine art degree from Johannesburg’s Technikon Witwatersrand in 2002. His work is included in numerous international public and private collections, including Tate Modern, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art, Savannah; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, Cape Town. Solo museum exhibitions have been held at the Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2016); Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia (2010) and Tate Modern, London (2008). Hlobo has participated in several biennales including the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2012), 54th Venice Biennale (2011), 6th Liverpool Biennial (2010) and 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, China (2008).
Hlobo has received numerous honors and distinctions such as the Rolex Visual Arts Protégé (2010-11); Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2009); and the Tollman Award for Visual Art (2006).
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