Botho Project Space launched Nelson Makamo’s first solo exhibition in five years in South Africa “Botho, Motho, Batho” over the weekend.

The exhibition celebrates Makamo’s 15-year career span as an artist and will be on view until 14 January 2021.

Botho Project Space is an artist-run visual arts platform with a unique program that anticipates projects that encourages artistic freedom and experimentations.
Botho identifies as a pan African visual arts platform, with intensions of creating solid relationships with like-minded institutions, visual artists, curators and thinkers that live and work on the African continent and in the diaspora.

Inspired by his travels throughout the African continent, Makamo has created a body of work that continues to reimagine and interrogate our humanness as a people, deliberately devoid of the ‘isms’ that plague societies.

Makamo uses acrylic, watercolour, oil and his signature medium charcoal to create works that capture the candid nature of everyday life, delving into themes that revolve around urbanism, migration, community and childhood.

Through a process of deep isolation and a pedagogical practice of intense observation, the multi-scaled body of work is a documentation of the ever-shifting dynamics of post-colonial Africa and is expressed predominantly through portraiture and figurative works.

Makamo is best known for his charcoal and oil paintings that redresses decades of images that have portrayed African children as destitute. Makamo’s career spans fifteen years since his first solo exhibition in Johannesburg, titled “Walk With Me” at Obert art gallery in 2005.

However, he has managed to solidify an iconic signature and a subject matter that has steadily placed him on a global stage, making him one of the world’s young and most sought-after visual artists of our times.

Makamo has exhibited in South Africa, USA, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Scotland. His work is featured in public and private collections, including City of Johannesburg, Oprah Winfrey, Standard Chartered, Matasis Investment Holdings, Georgio Armani, Hanzehof Zuphense Kunst Collection, Werksmans attorneys, Rand Merchant Bank, Telkom and diverse private collections.

Recent publications include; Time magazine, Vogue Portugal magazine, Create! Magazine, Visi magazine and GQ magazine to name a few.

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