Thank you for your inquiry! We're delighted to hear of your interest in our artwork. Our team is reviewing your request and will get back to you shortly.
000%
Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present Like a Fish in the Water, a solo exhibition by South African artist Terence Maluleke, opening on 21 November, 2024 (until 1 February, 2025).
Marking his first solo exhibition in the US, this series of new paintings is a vivid development of Maluleke’s personal and religious symbology, exploring themes of self-determination, community, ritual and artistic freedom. Like a Fish in the Water is a reckoning with his faith and expression of the desire for a life inscribed with agency and meaning.
A visual storyteller whose pictorial language marries a graphic sensibility with elements of traditional figuration, Maluleke draws heavily on motifs from both Christian theology and indigenous African spirituality in this body of work. A golden halo that could also be read as a crown of thorns features prominently in many of the paintings, alongside copies of the Bible, a blue candle that his church gave to him as a child and various timber sculptures of fish. Alongside the association with Jesus and the miraculous catching of fish in the Gospels, the latter is deployed in homage to the visionary South African sculptor Jackson Hlungwani, with whom Maluleke shares a deep spiritual and artistic connection.
The two artists are of Tsonga heritage and trace their origins to nearby villages in Limpopo province. Maluleke’s father was baptised by Hlungwani and he visited the late sculptor’s studio and compound as a child. The revered artist and pastor gave Maluleke’s family a large wooden carving of a fish, a subject he portrayed prolifically throughout his life as a representation of abundance, life and harmony between humans and nature. As a tribute to Hlungwani, Maluleke titled this body of work after the sculptor’s habitual reply when asked by arriving guests how he was: “Like a fish in the water,” he would respond.
In the starkness of their rendition, focus on foreground action against a flat background, and narrative impact, the works in this exhibition are reminiscent of traditional iconographic paintings. Maluleke’s palette is more subdued than earlier paintings, with a prevalence of golden/mustard hues, enlivened with an experimental approach to mark-making and inclusion of unconventional materials such as glitter. In contrast to the didacticism of religious art, however, he injects his own individual point of view and an ambiguous approach to meaning. He has cultivated a vocabulary of forms with personal significance that recur throughout his oeuvre – including calla lilies, which he describes as communicating the push and pull between strength and fragility; portraits of his sister Nozipho, whom he regards as an extension of himself; and the ‘lêkê’ plastic jelly sandal, which featured heavily in his first solo exhibition at Southern Guild, Grace in Grand Bassam. All of these appear in this latest body of work alongside religious symbols and objects of contemporary relevance (including a VR headset), establishing the primacy and power of one’s own unique mythology in building a life of meaning.
Blue Dance depicts a crowd of worshippers clad in the blue and white uniforms of the Apostolic and African Zionist churches, surrounding a haloed figure. Inspired by the memory of physical energy experienced at a recent church service, the work transmutes the rhythmical pattern of colour and shape into movement and sound. The person in the middle, says Maluleke, is “the guider and the light”. He is intentionally depicted asan anchoring presence, grounded in his own centre, but the congregants are harder to read: they are moving in their own directions and it is not clear if they are attracted to or repelled from him.
A painting of a red-roofed house with a halo hovering above it also invites multiple readings. The work envisions the artist’s lifelong dream to build his own home – a place of refuge and warmth, blessed by divine intervention. The building in this work is intact but the paint drips down from its walls and windows, as if the structure is dissolving. Is the promise of sacred protection forsaken? Maluleke offers an alternative interpretation: “I like the idea of human fallibility and emotional dissolution living together with faith. Even when we are at our lowest, rather than close ourselves off from shame, we can still go to God.”
Birth, death, sacrifice, transcendence – Maluleke depicts the arc of human struggle and contemplates the pursuit of purpose and connection. His faith encompasses the creation of his own cosmology free from the strictures of doctrine and the confines of Western conceptions of formalised religion. His artistic practice is a pilgrimage of sorts, an insistence on the redemptive power of the imagination and a dreaming into being of his highest ideals.
Like a Fish in the Water will run concurrently with two other exhibitions: Mbare Opera (Wycliffe Mundopa) and Methods of Flight (Amanda Shingirai Mushate and Grace Nyahangare).