Boytchie Phillip Newman

Operating under the artist’s name of Boytchie, Phillip Newman’s mixed media paintings, drawings and sculptures are expressionistic works rooted in the process of experimental play. “I am constantly salvaging different materials, playing, photographing and testing new techniques to use in my work,” says the artist. “I see my studio as a generative space of thinking, testing out artistic ideas and self-expression.”

Boytchie’s works often originate from drawings, sketched quickly and intuitively in ink on paper. The artist then begins to loosely translate the image to canvas or wood panel, liberally applying layers of paint in a way that relishes in the process of mark-making. Boytchie’s affinity for imperfections – dripping lines of pigment, scratches in the surface of the paint – highlights this point. His appropriation of found objects – such as sculptures fashioned from salvaged wood, or sketches that engrave the underside of domino tiles – is also important to his practice.

While Boytchie’s subjects vary from figures to geometric shapes, they share a sense of angularity, as if they are being shaped or restrained by their frames. For the artist, whose research is “broadly concerned with creolisation, masculinity, gangsterism, slavery and decolonial expression,” this sense of constraint – and liberation therefrom – offers social commentary as well as aesthetic intrigue. These characters, who are often skeletal in design, seem to want to break out of the boxes to which they have been confined. Cash Out, his most recent body of work, explores specifically the effects of capitalism and the hustle culture that it propagates. Accordingly, the figures in these works can be seen in various states of tension and disquiet, offering a salient critique of the exploitative and repressive conditions that heed the drive to consume.

In 2023, Boytchie presented his first solo exhibition, My Precious, at Worldart Gallery in Cape Town, followed by a residency show in the Goods project space at A4 Arts Foundation called Busted Head. Selected group exhibitions include wildflowers do care where they grow, 6 Derwent Street, Cape Town (2023), Greatest Hits, presented by the Association for Visual Arts at the Leeuwenhof Slave Remembrance Gallery, Cape Town (2023), Filthy Plinths, Under Projects, Cape Town (2022).