For Frieze LA Jenkins Johnson Gallery presents, The Mirrored Soft Life, by South African Artist Blessing Ngobeni. Within this new body of work, Ngobeni meditates on social awareness and historical events that continue with oppressive systems, addressing being black in an anti-black world, in both the present and future. The visual articulation is characterized by human and animal figures, whose bodily configurations are a collage of pictures and palimpsest of text that overlay and intersect in the work. Ngobeni states that, “we are haunted by memories of enslavement, land disposition, conquest, identity crisis, cultural erasure, missionary indoctrination, denial of citizenship, and labor exploitation. These are regimes of slavery, imperialism, colonialism, Apartheid, the underpinning racial capitalism, including Black suffering, which is synonymous with the black experience in postcolony.” Ngobeni has made postcolony the subject of his art by critiquing its tribulations of corruption, incompetence, and conspicuous consumption, all serving the protracted dehumanization of black bodies. Ngobeni also creates functional works combining textiles with classical style furniture. While making these works, he began researching how African slaves' hair was used to stuff the chair upholstery and mattress batting used by their white owners. Through this research Ngobeni began to explore how vintage objects carry DNA and spirit of slaves, also linking together thoughts of child labor and broader exploitation. Each time Ngobeni creates an immersive installation of a love seat, a foot stool and chair made from printed fabric with imagery based on series of other artworks.
Ngobeni was named by Artspace as one of the “most important African painters working today” and is a 2020 recipient of South Africa’s prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art. Ngobeni was an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA, and Cleveland Foundation’s Creative Fusion. His works are in public institutions throughout South Africa, including Johannesburg Art Gallery, and he has been featured in Phaidon’s Vitamin P3. Ngobeni was recently included in Art Basel's article “Cocoa butter poems and splashing colors: Discover five young artists in ‘OVR: Pioneers", and featured as one of the visionaries’ pushing boundaries both material and temporal. Ngobeni Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2024 the Blessing Ngobeni Art Prize was announced, an award that is aimed at assisting young and emerging visual artists to launch their career in the art industry. This Residency is a twelve-week studio residency in Johannesburg South Africa. Ngobeni will also be exhibiting at the Ivestec Cape Town Art Fair from February 16th - 18th, 2024 with Everard Read.
