Patrick Bongoy

Bongoy was born in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1980. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa and moved to South Africa in 2013.

Now based in Cape Town, Bongoy has built a multi-disciplinary practice whose central feature is his industrious and highly textural reuse of rubber from the inner tubes of tyres. Mixing this with other waste products such as hessian sacking, industrial packaging and textiles, he cuts and weaves his materials together to create complex, layered sculptures and three-dimensional reliefs. His painstaking process draws on traditional basket-making skills while referencing the physical labour that defines day-to-day life in the DRC.

His 2022 solo at Southern Guild, Unseen Dimensions of the Known, extends towards themes of wider resonance with the human condition, beyond the physical aspects of our identities, and what personal or collective liberation and fulfilment of our purpose means.

Previously, Bongoy has held solo shows at Gallery MOMO, Johannesburg; Ebony/Curated and the Association of Visual Art, Cape Town; THK, Cologne and Cape Town; and This Is Not a White Cube, Lisbon and Luanda. He has taken part in multiple group exhibitions, including at the African American Museum of Dallas, Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch Triennale, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art’s NMAFA+ Series at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg.

His work has been shown at fairs such as 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair in London, Contemporary Istanbul, and Lisboa Art Fair, and with Southern Guild at Expo Chicago and Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

He has work in the collections of the Harn Museum of Art in Florida, IZIKO South African National Gallery and UNISA Art Gallery, as well as private and public collections around the world. Most recently, Bongoy was shortlisted for the 2024 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize.