Nandipha Mntambo - Love and its companions : Stockholm

It is with great pleasure that Andréhn-Schiptjenko announces the second solo-exhibition of South African artist Nandipha Mntambo at the gallery. 

The exhibition will showcase a new body of work comprising sculpture in cowhide, Mntambo’s signature material, as well as works on paper and paintings. Having previously explored concepts such as the doppelganger and the recognition of ones dark double as well as the simultaneous embrace of attraction and repulsion, Mntambo continues the exploration of intimate relationships. As suggested in the exhibition title – Love and its companions, the challenges of the dichotomies of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, remain at the core of the artists œuvre. This is particularly true of the sculptures with titles such as Eros and Contempt Waiting wherein the process of cutting, moulding and shaping the hide are clearly visible – creating forms where the void is as dense with meaning as the hide that encompasses it.

The exhibition also, for the first time, includes paintings on canvas, a simplification of the human form and in many ways related to the sculptures as layered and translucent colours are used to create depth. They may be understood as a simplification of the human form but are also studies of colour and depth. Likewise, Topography of Memory, the works on paper using ink and cowhair are distinctive and painterly while referencing the sculptures in their materiality.

Nandipha Mntambo was born 1982 in Swaziland and currently lives and works in Johannesburg. She received her MFA from Michaelis School of Fine Art, Univeristy of Cape Town in 2007 and was awarded the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2011. Mntambo was one of four artists shortlisted for the 2014 AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (Canada). Her work has been included in a larger number of prestigious groupshows and biennales over the year and is widely collected. She can currently be seen in The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists, next at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC (8 April – 2 August 2015).

Upcoming projects include What remains is tomorrow curated by Christopher Till and Jeremy Rose, the Pavilion of South Africa at the Venice Biennale and the commissioning of a large site-specific work at this year’s edition of the Wanås Sculpture Park. She is also due to inaugurate the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town next year.