SIMPHIWE NDZUBE

Simphiwe Ndzube’s site-specific installation, which reimagines and expands a recent sculptural work, Ndlovukazi. A Boschian hybrid creature—part fish, part whale, with bird-like attributes—the work is a hybrid mash-up of possibility, rising from cracked earth, hinting at water that once was. Ndzube’s work stitches together a subjective account of the Black experience in post-apartheid South Africa from a mythological perspective, addressing fables and the surreal in his work towards a new cosmology. Referencing magical realism alongside a pantheon of gods, demigods, and ancestors that populate his paintings, Ndzube’s mythical, imagined creature seems to have walked right out of the sea, or perhaps to have left behind the remains of waters that have dried.

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

Ndzube’s work is characterized by a fundamental interplay between objects, media and two-dimensional surfaces; stitching together a subjective account of the Black experience in post-apartheid South Africa from a mythological perspective. Recent exhibitions include Isithunywa so Moya | Messenger of the Spirit, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2022, solo); Masemola Road, Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2022); and Oracles of the Pink Universe, Denver Art Museum, Denver USA (2021, solo). His work is collected by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, France; Iziko South African National Gallery, South Africa; Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, South Africa; Rubell Museum, and many others.

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 include Ben Okri, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, and Zakes Mda. In particular, Ndzube highlights Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community by Wendy B Faris and Lois Parkinson Zamora which 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.