Masindi Mbolekwa (b.2002) is a visual artist from Johannesburg. His practice is as an oil painter
primarily. He is concerned with pictorial space and the ways in which it is utilized in the creation
of a dialogue between metaphysical/abstract and material/representational realms.
Mbolekwa is an Honours graduate if the University of The Witwatersrand’s BA in Fine Art course (2023). He has participated in various group exhibitions including ‘Screen-In-Time' (2022), ‘What Comes First?’ (2022), ‘Siyabuka’ (2023), ‘Crossroads: Tsila Tse Pedi’ (2024) and ‘Figurative Frontiers’ (2024).
In the year 2024 Mbolekwa was featured in Wanted Magazine’s annual ‘Young and Vital’ artists list, and was the recipient of the senior residency of the artist collective Blvck Block. He has also tutored in the ‘Drawing and Contemporary Practice’ module of the Fine Arts course at the University of the Witwatersrand and completed an artist-led commission project with Rand Mutual Assurance.
Mbolekwa’s practice is a poetically loaded engagement with personal and cultural history and the ontology of natal alienation within a postcolony through the consideration of forms of earth as spiritual, and the use of abstract form, colour contrast, bodily gesture and archived knowledges as a language to communicate narrative and myth as well as facilitate emotive experience.
