Mmangaliso Nzuza

Mmangaliso Nzuza (b.1998 in Empangeni, South Africa) is a painter based in Cape Town. Working primarily on a large scale, his sensuous oil paintings depict angular, figurative compositions imbued with both the familiar and imagined.

In 2022, Nzuza completed an MA (Hons) in Government, Policy and Society at the University of Edinburgh before returning to South Africa to pursue art. Growing up in a conservative environment, he used artmaking as an outlet to negotiate a rich and complex interior life. In inventing and refining his own style, he sought to convey more feeling and movement, more vulnerability in his subjects.

Nzuza has arrived at a distinctive visual language that is both painterly and restrained, recalling the bold fragmentation of the early 20th-century Cubist painters. The human figure acts as a springboard for his interest in composition; drawn without particularity from a learned muscle memory, his bodies contort into exploratory proportions and configurations. His subjects are weighted, exuding solidity and a sculptural presence that seem to declare “We are here”.

Drawing on allegorical symbols, colour theory and gestural mark-making, he harnesses his practice as means to navigate the self and other, exploring themes of community and subjectivity in his portraits and still-lifes.

Nzuza has shown his work in fairs such as 1-54 (London and New York), Prizm (Miami), The Armory Show (New York), Enter Art Fair (Copenhagen), and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, including a Solo booth presented by THK Gallery. He was an artist-in-residence at Quartier am Hafen in Cologne, Germany in 2023, and has taken part in group exhibitions including RE-KNEW-ED at The Gallery Society in Edinburgh and Sasol New Signatures: Art Beyond Imagination at Pretoria Art Museum in South Africa.

His first solo exhibition, An Open Letter, opens at Southern Guild Cape Town in August 2024.