South Africa
Art from South Africa, from San rock painting and Mapungubwe gold to beadwork, art under apartheid, photography and contemporary work.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for South Africa are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
San painters left thousands of images in the rock shelters of the Drakensberg, where the eland appears again and again. At Mapungubwe, in the 13th century, goldsmiths made a small gold-foil rhinoceros, and later Zulu, Xhosa and Ndebele women developed beadwork and painted house walls as languages of identity.
In the 20th century, Irma Stern painted with Expressionist colour and Gerard Sekoto showed township life before leaving for Paris in 1947. Under apartheid, art centres and printmaking studios such as Rorke's Drift trained Black artists, including John Muafangejo, whose linocuts tell stories in black and white. Photography carried special weight: David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng and Jo Ractliffe recorded the country's landscapes and social divides. William Kentridge's charcoal animations, drawn, erased and redrawn, reflect on memory and violence, and Marlene Dumas, who moved to Amsterdam, paints unsettling portraits in washes of ink and oil.
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