Southern Guild is pleased to announce its representation of Johannesburg-based multidisciplinary artist Nandipha Mntambo.

Born in 1982 in Mbabane, Eswatini (previously Swaziland), Mntambo's practice addresses ongoing debates around gender, body politics, and identity. Working across sculpture, photography, video, and mixed media, she explores liminal boundaries between human and animal, femininity and masculinity, attraction and repulsion, life and death.

Mntambo completed a Master’s in Fine Art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 2007. Originally intending to study forensic pathology, she redirected her focus to fine art, a shift that continues to inform her sustained engagement with the body and corporeal presence.

She is best known for her figurative cowhide sculptures, in which cured hides are draped over casts of her own body and set with resin. These works confront expected associations with femininity, sexuality, and vulnerability, using animal skin as both garment and surrogate body. By embracing the material’s ambiguity, Mntambo stages a continual oscillation between protection and exposure, beauty and abjection, control and surrender. Across her broader practice, natural materials and bodily reference points are used to test the unstable divisions between species, gendered representation, and psychological states.

In 2017, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) presented Material Value, a major solo exhibition including the large-scale installation EMABUTFO (2012). Mntambo's bronze sculpture Ophelia (2015) is held as a permanent acquisition in the Norval Foundation sculpture garden, Cape Town.

Her first solo exhibition with Southern Guild, Transcending Instinct (2022), marked her debut body of functional sculpture, translating core materials and forms from her sculptural archive into seating works that blur the boundary between function and dysfunction, inviting viewers to physically inhabit bodily form.

Other notable solo exhibitions include Chimera (Everard Read, Johannesburg, 2023); Agoodjie (Everard Read, Cape Town, 2022; Johannesburg, 2021); The Snake You Left Inside Me (Stevenson, Johannesburg, 2017); Metamorphoses (Stevenson, Cape Town, 2015); presentations with Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm; and Faena (2011 – 2012), the travelling exhibition produced following her Standard Bank Young Artist Award.

Selected group exhibitions include TOP FORM, Sport +Art (Stadsmuseum Woerden,Netherlands, 2025) andWe Are Nature (Singer Laren, Netherlands, 2025); Movements, (MuseumHilversum,Netherlands, 2024) and signifying the impossible song (Southern Guild, Los Angeles, 2024); In Brilliant Light (Museum Volkenkunde, Netherlands, 2023); IncarNations: African Art as Philosophy (BOZAR, Brussels, 2019); Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity (Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2019); Beyond Borders: Global Africa (University of Michigan Museum of Art, 2018); Regarding Africa: Contemporary Art and Afro-Futurism (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2017); Disguise: Masks and Global African Art (Brooklyn Museum; Fowler Museum at UCLA; Seattle Art Museum, 2015–16); the South African Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and the Dakar Biennale (2010, 2016).

Mntambo's awards include the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art (2012), the Wits/BHP Billiton Fellowship (2010), Civitella Ranieri Fellowship (2013), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize shortlist (2014), and the Glamour South Africa Women of the Year Creator Award (2016).


Portrait: Graham DeLacey