MASINDI MBOLEKWA

His work engages poetically with personal and cultural history, as well as the ontology of natal alienation within a postcolony, through a consideration of forms of earth as spiritual. He employs abstract form, colour contrast, bodily gesture, and archived knowledges as a language to communicate narrative and myth, while facilitating emotive experience.

Mbolekwa holds an Honours degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand (2023). His first solo presentation, Feast of Flesh and Prayer, was held at Ellis House Gallery in May 2025. He has participated in various group exhibitions including Screen-In-Time (2022), Siyabuka (2023), Crossroads: Tsila Tse Pedi (2024), Figurative Frontiers (2024), and Tswela Pele (2025). In 2024, Mbolekwa was featured in Wanted Magazine’s annual Young and Vital artists list, shortlisted for the Cassirer Welz Prize, and was the recipient of a senior residency with the artist collective Blvck Block.

His practice is a mythico-poetic engagement with self, an ongoing failure to taxonomise the intersections of soul and void. Drawing from afropessimist theory and existentialist philosophy, his work reflects through the union of painterly formalisms and constructivist symbol-making on personal, familial, spatial, and ontological histories as they present within his experience of socio-spiritual identity. The work is a process of knowing, unknowing, and unfolding the ways in which self is given form, and how that form is maintained within the systems, epistemes, and spaces of a contemporary postcolony.

There is a poetry of the ineffable in this practice. It remains an ongoing question, a spiritual investigation into the ontology of Blackness. Situated closer to intersections of inquiry than to definitive conclusions, the work acknowledges and continues a thought-feeling that is failed by the vocabulary of empiricism and linearity. It is a younger expression, a union of process and composition that feels toward a question that will never be finished asking. In the brushstroke, the stain, and the spaces between canvas threads exists an inherent failure of expression. Within the registers of spiritual and erotic knowledge, as articulated by Audre Lorde (1978), this work operates as a visual treatise on impasse. It is a flirtation with eternal seeking, infinite failure, and surrender to an always-almost.

Each work explores the relationship between representational symbol as holder, communicator, and disruptor of histories, contexts, and canons, and abstract form and texture as drivers of experiential engagement. Abstract form becomes the surface upon which language is encoded, read, and misread. This relationship mirrors conceptual forms that bind material realities to corresponding ripples within the metaphysical realm. As fable reflects lesson, object reflects void or the absence of form. On the canvas, a mapping of the real and the abstract occurs, where figures and essential shapes contest subjecthood. Two worlds and the crossing between them emerge not in isolation but in relation, forming