Discover the woven works of these artists who have recently shown at Investec Cape Town Art Fair

From embroidery to silicone, these artists weave their mediums to create intricate and textured scenes.

 

Kimathi Mafafo (1984) | EBONY/CURATED

 

Kimathi Mafafo is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice ranges from embroidery, oil painting to installation. Born in

Kimberley in the the semi-arid Northern Cape of South Africa, Mafafo questions historical stereotypes around gender

inequality in Africa. She primarily focuses on celebrating the black female form placing it in often verdant, abstracted

imagery characterised by lush greenery and sensuous drapery which are far removed from the dusty mining town where

she grew up.

 

Read more about Kimathi here.

 

 

Maria Lai (1919 - 2013) | Galleria Giovanni Bonelli

 

Regarded as one of the most important figures of women's art in Italy, she spent her life between Sardinia, Rome (from 1939 to 1943) and Venice (from 1943 to 1945) where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts with Arturo Marini as her professor. From 1945, she returned to Sardinia and in 1956 in Rome, she was truly noticed and invited to exhibit her work at the Quadriennale. Between 1957 and 1961 exhibitions and awards followed one after the other but after this stint, Lai decided to retire and gave up exhibiting for ten years, devoting herself

completely to research work. In 1971, her first frames after 10 years were presented in Rome, in the Schneider gallery.

 

From that moment, her exhibition career resumed at full speed. In 1978, she would be present at the Venice Biennale in the group show "Materialization of Language".

 

In addition to sewn works, drawing and painting, theater and

performance, Maria Lai devoted herself to site-specific installations. In 1981 Sardinia, "Legarsi alla montagna" (Binding to the mountain) would make her internationally famous.

 

Read more about Maria here.

 

 

Igshaan Adams (1982) | blank projects

 

Igshaan Adams’s practice coalesces performance, weaving, sculpture and installation. Born in Bonteheuwel, a suburb in Cape Town, South Africa, Adams draws upon his background to contest racial, sexual and religious boundaries. This intersectional topography remains visible throughout his practice and serves as a palimpsest upon which traces of personal histories are inscribed and reinscribed. He explains; “I’m interested in the personal stories recorded on the surface. What is recorded is not necessarily always a factual account but can be what is imagined - a combination of myth-making and meaning-making”.

 

Adams approaches materiality through his own subjectivity. Often, cultural and religious references are used in conjunction with surfaces that have always been present throughout his life; thread, beads, wire, linoleum, cotton twine, fabric. His interest in the material oscillates between the intuitive process of handling different substances as well as a formal inquiry into how various materials behave in different contexts and how they transfigure or evolve depending. Likening the material’s potential for evolution to his own potential for evolution, Adams is engaged in broadening his ideas of selfhood in an ongoing process of covering and uncovering, doing and undoing.

 

Read more about Igshaan here.

 

 

Thania Petersen (1980) | Gregor Podnar

 

Thania Petersen is a multidisciplinary artist. Her discourses are about "identity" in today's South Africa. With photographic "self-portraits", installations and multi-sensory performances, she challenges classifications of apartheid and also their everyday further acceptance of these labels in the post-apartheid era. Among her points of reference are the histories of African colonial imperialism, contemporary Western consumer culture, her deeply personal Cape Malay heritage, and the legends and myths of Sufi Islamic ceremonies.

 

Having studied at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art in London from 2001-2003, Petersen trained in both Zimbabwe (2004) and a year later in South Korea (with renowned Korean ceramist Hwang Yea Sook), she subsequently participated in the South Korean Ceramic Bienalle that same year. From 2000-2007 Petersen remained the resident painter of props and costumes for the London based Yaa Asantewa Arts Group at the Notting Hill Gate Carnival, before settling back in Cape Town full time.

 

Read more about Thania here.

 

 

Troy Makaza (1995) | First Floor Gallery Harare

 

Having specialized in painting in art school but always interested in form and texture, Makaza decided to develop his own hybrid medium which would enable him to unite his artistic goals. After experimenting with various materials, Makaza arrived at silicone a material which can be cast, painted with as well as woven and tied. Over the past eight years Makaza’s works progressively developed as an opportunity to speak both viscerally and philosophically to the issues Makaza finds compelling as a young Zimbabwean concerned with politics, history and power and their impact on daily lives of ordinary people as well as a globally engaged millennial. Resonating with traditional modes like weaving and tapestry but unequivocally contemporary, Makaza’s works articulate the conversation of what African and uniquely Zimbabwean contemporary can be – a paradigm internationally engaging and locally compelling. Makaza’s works has received early critical and collector acclaim, taking part in the 2018 survey of Zimbabwean contemporary art at Zeitz MoCAA, winning the Tomorrows/Today prize at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair in 2019, joining important institutional collections like that of Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden in Marrakech, Rollins College museum collection and noted private collections like Jorge Perez personal collection in Miami.

 

Troy was Tomorrows/Today prizewinner in 2019.

 

Read more about Troy here.