Rich Mnisi

Born in Johannesburg in 1991, Mnisi’s broad design vision embraces fashion and functional sculpture. His work flows according to the themes and motifs he returns to and continually pushes forward: the women in his life, queerness and the VaTsonga tribe.

Mnisi graduated from Johannesburg’s LISOF School of Fashion in 2014, following which he was named Africa Fashion International Young Designer of the Year at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Africa. He founded his eponymous label in 2015, creating genderless, seasonless collections infused with his own personal narrative and heritage.

When designing objects of furniture, Mnisi frees himself from received assumptions of their base features and functional characteristics. Rather than being led by ideas of how a chaise or console table should look, his approach is organic, beginning with moulding the pieces in clay and drawing from human figures or his own memory.

Mnisi’s foray into functional art began with Nwa-Mulamula's Chaise and Nwa-Mulamula's Tears, a homage to the memory of his late great-grand mother, an ever-present guardian whose teachings have lived on in his family through storytelling generation after generation. The upholstered organic-shaped chaise and bronze tear-shaped stool were commissioned by Southern Guild in 2018.

His first solo exhibition of sculptural furniture, titled Nyoka (meaning snake in Xitsonga), was a bold exploration of shape and fluidity, brought to life through vivid contrasts of forms and materials, including bronze, wool, resin and glass. Nyoka was made in collaboration with several South African artisan studios including Monkeybiz, Coral & Hive and Bronze Age Studio.

Mnisi's second solo exhibition, Dzuvula (Shedding Skin), expanded on the cosmology of duality that emerged with his debut collection. This most recent body of work complicates the interplay of the mundane and the magical, the matriarchal and magisterial – themes that have emanated from the artist’s embrace of fluidity as a guiding philosophy and aesthetic approach.

Mnisi’s work has been presented by Southern Guild at Design Miami and Investec Cape Town Art Fair.