Nhlanhla Nhlapho
Nhlanhla Nhlapo (b. 1988, Frankfurt, Free State, South Africa) studied fine arts degree four years programme at Tshwane University of Technology specializing in painting and has been teaching painting there since 2013. Nhlapo’s practice takes Dutch masters’ techniques and 17th century Dutch landscape painting as a point of departure, situating it in the South African landscape and his hometown of Frankfurt in particular and populating it with images from his family albums. The works engage both with the nature and cultural context of depiction in art history as well as the unspoken and unacknowledged politics of trauma within carried through landscape and implicit trauma of colonization, loss and confrontation between modernity and tradition in family photographs. Through many personal and day to day conflicts growing up in rural Free State and later moving to Gauteng and City Life, Nhlapo endeavors to create a personal narrative with this body of work, a symbolic longing to re-connect to the Land of his Ancestors; His reference to the Dutch Baroque Interior paintings reflects the firsthand experience of both his late grandmother and mother being Domestic workers and the hardship he experienced with their absence in his formative years during Apartheid. Nhalapo was awarded the 2018 Unisa Academic Portrait Commission of Chairperson Mr Simelane and the 2018 Artist residency at Lacreusette in France Boussac with Louis Jansen van Vurren. His first solo exhibition was with Lizamore Associates in 2019.
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