Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, June 3, 2022: Simphiwe Ndzube, A south African emerging artist (#1586)

Simphiwe Ndzube (1990) was born in Hofmeyr, Eastern Cape South Africa , and now lives in Los Angeles. He has a BA Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.

Through painting, sculpture, and spatial intervention, Simphiwe Ndzube stages an introduction to his imaginative universe: the Mine-moon. He states, "We begin in the real world and through interaction with the work enter a fabulist tale in progress. I’ve attempted to create the genesis of a cosmology that finds itself in the uncharted lands and trackless seas. In it exists characters, gods, and demigods—different people influenced by the post-apartheid black South African experience. It emerges from the tradition of magical realism and is expanding to points currently unknown."

Narrative influences describes magical realism as "a mode suited to exploring—and transgressing—boundaries, whether the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical or generic. [It] facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, [and] systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes." Ndzube's recent body of work tells a story of power and conflict—within it is a focus on the people affected by abuses of power; these figures are on their own search for freedom, love, and meaning in a setting that has deemed them, as Frantz Fanon phrased it, the wretched of the earth.

Oracles of the Pink Universe, the artist's first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, took place at the Denver Art Museum in 2021. Previous solo exhibitions have taken place at Museo Kaluz (2019); CC Foundation, Shanghai (2018); Nicodim Gallery; and WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town, alongside Stevenson.

Ndzube has completed residencies at Dalton Warehouse Studios, South Central, Los Angeles (2018) and Greatmore Studios, Woodstock Cape Town (2016). He is the recipient of the Culture Creators 'Innovators & Leaders' Award in Art (2019), the Tollman Award for Visual Art (2016), the Michaelis Prize (2015), the Simon Gerson Prize (2015) and the Cecil Skotnes Scholarship (2013) at UCT.

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