Zizipho Poswa

Born in 1979 in the town of Mthatha in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, Poswa studied surface design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Straddling figuration and abstraction, her anthropomorphic totems are characterised by an elliptical approach to form and bold colour choice. Her work is a deep invocation of her personal journey and an homage to the spiritual traditions and matriarchal stewardship of her Xhosa culture.

The artist’s first solo exhibition, iLobola (2021), paid homage to the spiritual offering underpinning the custom of ‘lobola’, or bride-wealth – the cow – with each of the sculptures alluding to a specific stage or role player in the negotiation process preceding a traditional Xhosa marriage. Poswa’s second solo exhibition, uBuhle boKhokho (Beauty of Our Ancestors), reinterpreted historic and contemporary African hairstyles from across the continent, thus situating the artist in an expanding network of Black women who continue to self-define and affirm their own standards of beauty.

Poswa’s debut solo in the United States, iiNtsika zeSizwe (Pillars of the Nation), was her first sculpture series made entirely in bronze. Held at Galerie56 in New York in partnership with Southern Guild, the exhibition was inspired by the practice of ‘umthwalo’ whereby rural women carry heavy loads on their heads, often walking long distances on foot. With their elliptical forms balanced atop anthropomorphic bases, the works symbolise both the physical and metaphorical acts of bearing the load.

The artist’s most recent solo exhibition – Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty), which inaugurated Southern Guild’s Los Angeles gallery in early 2024 – explored African cultures of bodily adornment through the depiction of symbolic amulets as bronze-cast elements atop vast ceramic silos. Reaching heights of over 8 feet tall, the series is her most ambitious technical undertaking to date. The clay bodies were produced during a residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics, California State University Long Beach in Summer 2023.

Poswa’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Art Institute of Chicago, as well as important private and corporate collections such as the LOEWE Foundation, Schulting Art Collection and the collection of HRH Franz, Duke of Bavaria. She has taken part in group exhibitions at Kunsthal KAde (Amersfoort, The Netherlands), Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago), Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles), the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (Perth), and other galleries in New York, Paris, Milan, Hamburg, Liverpool and Singapore.