South African contemporary artists making waves
Are you looking to find out more about contemporary South African artists, or broaden your art collection? These artists have established their value in the secondary art market.
Athi-Patra Ruga
“RuPaul’s Drag Race meets Helmut Newton”
Ruga’s artworks prance on the fringes between fashion, performance, and contemporary art – their queer-positive art challenges the heteronormative narratives of African cultural stereotypes and gender roles. The work pulses with colour, sensuality and a rococo opulence reminiscent of photographers David La Chapelle and Miles Aldridge but infused with a definitive African aesthetic. French fashion house Dior collaborated with this artist on a range of handbags in 2019.
One of Ruga’s best-known artworks is Knight of the Long Knives I (2013), a neon fantasy featuring a balloon-covered figure straddling a zebra, surrounded by a phantasmagorical jungle scape. “The title is a tongue-in-cheek play on that unfounded settler panic,” the artist told the Guardian in a 2018 interview. “We’re not killing each other. We are steamrolling ahead towards progress.” The iconic work now forms part of the permanent collection at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.
In the early 2010s, Ruga’s hand-made tapestries became an important vehicle for elaborating the artist’s queer-positive and baroque cosmology of the Versatile Kingdom of Azania, a fictionalised South Africa ruled by a non-dynastic line of female monarchs. These are important collector pieces and have demonstrated their strong investment value at Strauss & Co’s auctions, selling for six-figure sums.
Nontsikelelo Veleko
“My photos are a form of public history”
Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko is best known for her arresting street-fashion portraits, which explore contemporary African identity and how it manifests in street style. “Fashion and graffiti are always seen at face value and in one dimension. But if you scrape through the cloth and the texture and the details, you can understand what’s happening socially. What is happening when skirts come up and what is happening when skirts come down? It’s a language,” Veleko explained during an interview at Design Indaba. She is also the previous winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award. Her work hasn’t yet reached the high prices achieved by her contemporaries, and so it offers prospective collectors of contemporary African photography a foot in the door. Her work Figure in Prayer Pose sold for R17 500 during Strauss & Co’s Johannesburg Auction week in November.
Georgina Gratrix
“In a world of excess and kitsch and general ‘too-much-ness’, I want my work to feel the same way.”
Interacting with one of Gratix’s impasto expressionistic works is a bit like stuffing your face with rich, sweet confectionery. It’s over the top, it’s delicious, it revels unashamedly in excess and decadence. Her tongue-in-cheek, exuberant style has made her a darling on the trendy gallery scene and with growing interest from contemporary collectors her work is performing strongly on the secondary market, regularly reaching six-figure sums.
Gratrix was awarded the Discovery Prize, for her presentation with SMAC Gallery at the 50th anniversary edition of Art Brussels, in Belgium. The panel commended Gratrix for her “painterly take” on sculpture, and “sculptural approach to painting”.
Marlene Steyn
“I want to create figures who are in a process of becoming – who never reach a final destination or a point of coherence.”
Painter Marlene Steyn’s artworks are a bit like a pastel-infused Escher Neapolitan ice-cream dream – uncanny dreamscapes of tightly knitted bodies, employing trompe l’oeil effects that first discombobulate the viewers and then completely draw them in. “All of my work moves towards the same questions and themes, but I’m very interested in the process we follow to create a sense of self in this contemporary time – especially as a woman … My work is a combination of deep-diving into the conscious, trying to find calm in the craziness of everyday life, while spiritually trying to make sense of what a self is,” she said in an interview with We-Heart.com
Steyn made her auction debut this year at Strauss & Co with two works that both found buyers. The artist’s large figural composition The Leaf Blows Hers from 2017 sold for R136 560, a worthy affirmation from the secondary art market.
