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Zizipho Poswa's large-scale ceramic and bronze sculptures are bold invocations of African womanhood. Her work stands in testimony to her matrilineal heritage and celebrates the life-sustaining roles that Xhosa women play in traditional and contemporary life.
Born in 1979 in the town of Mthatha in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, Zizipho Poswa studied surface design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. In 2005, she and fellow ceramicist Andile Dyalvane co-founded Imiso Ceramics, whose handmade vessels and tableware have earned the studio an international following.
Since 2017, Poswa’s oeuvre for Southern Guild straddles figuration and abstraction, employing an intuitive vocabulary of form, colour and texture. 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, many of which were embodied by the artist herself in an accompanying series of photographic portraits. In so doing, Poswa interweaves the personal and historic; situating herself in a vast and ever-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 (The Pillars of the Nation), was also 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 series, Indyebo yakwaNtu (Black Bounty) – one of two inaugural exhibitions in Southern Guild's new Los Angeles gallery –is her most ambitious technical undertaking to date. Comprising five colossal ceramic and bronze sculptures reaching heights of over 8 feet tall, the clay bodies were produced during her summer-long residency at the Center for Contemporary Ceramics (CCC) at California State University Long Beach in 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), Marian Ibrahim (Chicago), Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles), the Indian Ocean Craft Triennial (Perth), and other galleries in New York, Paris, Hamburg and Liverpool. Southern Guild has presented her work at The Armory Show, Expo Chicago, Design Miami, the Salon Art and Design, and PAD London.
Zizipho Poswa
Mu'Teni (She that Shines like the Sun), 2021Glazed stoneware
59 x 25.25 x 25.25 in.
Zizipho Poswa
uTsiki (Welcome Ceremony), 2021Glazed earthenware, bronze
87 x 49.25 x 26.38 in.
Group Show
Cape Town 19 Jul - 12 Sept 2018
Zizipho Poswa
Cape Town 17 Nov - 31 Jan 2023
Zizipho Poswa
Cape Town 25 Mar - 1 Jul 2021
Zizipho Poswa
Los Angeles 22 Feb - 4 May 2024
Group show
Cape Town 29 Oct - 4 Dec 2020
Group Show
Cape Town 14 Feb - 18 Apr 2018
Group show
Cape Town 9 Apr - 7 May 2020
Group show
Cape Town 26 Nov - 7 Feb 2019
Zizipho Poswa
Galerie56 - New York 15 May - 25 Aug 2023
Group show
Cape Town 14 Nov - 30 Jan 2020
1 Jan 1970
12 May 2024
25 Oct 2021
4 May 2021
6 Mar 2023
27 May 2020