The Kagiso Group has a commitment to the upliftment and empowerment of previously disadvantaged individuals. For this reason, we take pleasure in highlighting the work of a local artist whose work embodies the society in which we live – Velaphi Mzimba.

Velaphi Mzimba was born in Johannesburg in 1959. His initial education at local schools and finally at the Johannesburg Art Foundation must be reviewed against a backdrop of a country contorted by the grip of apartheid in the early 60’s and 70’s. The death throes of that regime took nearly two decades and scarred in one way or another all those who were involved in its annihilation. Artists, particularly by the nature of their calling, provide a mirror into which one can gaze and see society with both its nobility and warts.

It has always been so, from the illuminated manuscripts of the Dark Ages through Albrecht Dürer, Goya and Picasso. Just as the finest artists of earlier times described in their paintings and sculptures the horrors of war, pestilence and of course also the ravishing beauties and technological achievements of their period, so do artists of our contemporary era comment on society through the vehicles of Pop Art, Hyper-realism, Neo-expressionism and increasingly idiosyncratic technologically driven art forms. Society is flayed, its viscera exposed and examined with both humour and dark pessimism. This mechanism seems to be a completely necessary component of a free breathing, intellectually rigorous democracy as no society appears to function for very long when its artists are censored.

Mzimba grew to maturity under the hardest of censorships and oppression. It is remarkable therefore that his art is so effervescently optimistic. Due to a solid technical training, which was rare in his generation, Mzimba executes with an arsenal of honed skills some of the most arresting images of contemporary South Africa.

Giant faces with every subtle nuance examined confront the viewer. He invites you to draw comparison with the American Chuck Close. Huge fruit and everyday objects painted close up and dominating space with their very scale recall the giant objects from Oldenburg’s consumer society. Squashed cans and found objects litter Mzimba’s abstracted recollections of his childhood. Whatever comparisons are drawn and lines of influence connected, what is inescapable is that Mzimba stands completely within his continent. His portraits, if indeed they are just “portraits”, stare back at the viewer with a self confidence that comes from a rock solid cultural base – be that Samburu, Zulu, Xhosa or Ndebele. Utterly African they all are. His objects and now famous apples and pears, are somehow just as rooted in the land that gave us his people. So too are Mzimba’s contemporary comments on the everyday life of a boy growing up in South Africa.

An underlying optimism in life itself and the future pervades his work. Sometimes playful, at other times dark and somewhat introspective, his palette is always fresh, the colour daringly juxtaposed.

The fact that these colours are so beautifully laid down and the images so astoundingly polished has made Mzimba one of the most collected artists of his generation.