David Koloane is widely recognized as one of the seminal figures in the recent history of South African art. He is one of a handful of people who were willing and able to forge open spaces where black artists could interact, work, and exhibit under the ideological and physical constraints of the apartheid system. Occupying the role of artist, curator, writer, and facilitator, Koloane’s considerable contributions range from his own creative practice to the creation and administration of a series of studio, exhibition, and workshop spaces.
Studying first at the legendary Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg in the 1960s, then with Bill Ainslie at the Johannesburg Art Foundation in the 1970s, Koloane was the visual arts coordinator for the historic Culture and Resistance Festival held in Gaborone, Botswana, in 1982, and a key figure in the founding of the Thupelo Art Project in 1985, which continues to run annual workshops for local and international artists. In 1998 the government of the Netherlands honored Koloane with the Prince Claus Fund Award for his contribution to the development of the visual arts in South Africa.
Today he still works in his studio at the Fordsburg Artists Studios (also known as the Bag Factory) in downtown Johannesburg, an artists’ cooperative he helped found.
Born in 1938 in Alexandra, he moved with his family to Soweto just before he began high school. Koloane’s formative years were spent within the urban sprawl of Johannesburg’s two most central townships. While the impression of these townships has never left Koloane’s range of subject matter, his attachment to the figuration of urban life is far from simplistic. Rather, he attempts to represent both the tangible and intangible actualities of communal existence, and to capture transitory moments of the chaotic, uncertain, and volatile forces that drive a city like Johannesburg.
His success in conveying a sense of this unpredictable energy owes much to his expressionistic style. In his work aggressive lines wrestle against a muddy palette, and figures and forms become almost allegorical through their crudely stylized treatment. In Transit II (2001) the commuting crowd shuffles along, indifferent to the presence of those with whom they rub shoulders, their faces blank or their eyes covered by reflective glasses, hollow and ghostly like the dogs that also make up Koloane’s iconography.
The menace of rabid canines, the opposite of Koloane’s apathetic commuters, although they share the same eerie eyes, appear in Dogs (2007). Emerging from a smoky twilight haze, these mongrels occupy both a real and ephemeral space. As with so much of Koloane’s work, they embody both the accepted realities of life in Johannesburg and the ominous threat of violence that agitates its restless motion.
Commuters 2001
Mixed media on canvas
120 x 150 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and
Galerie Seippel, Cologne
Photographer: Press office, City of Bochum
© David Koloane
Green and Yellow Eyes 2008
Acrylic on paper
70 x 100 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Photographer: John Hodgkiss
© David Koloane