International exhibition programme and gallery Stevenson has announced the presentation of multidisciplinary artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi‘s second solo exhibition entitled Landings. This marks the second partnership between the gallery and the artist with it being her first exhibition in Cape Town.
Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi has made portraits of Black trailblazers and muted depictions of architecture, yet she’s best known for her minimal, pastel-hued canvases of an imagined Black gymnastics team. These works thematize performance and the relationship between the individual and a larger group. Born in New York to a South African activist father and a Greek American mother, Nkosi obtained her BA from Harvard University before completing her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
The recipient of the 2019 Tollman Award for the Visual Arts, she’s been included in shows at Tate Modern in London, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Through painting, Nkosi explores race, identity, and the complicated issues underlying visibility and representation. She has also worked in film, installation, and performance.
While Nkosi is best known as a painter, her practice spans multiple mediums including film, installation and performance. In her paintings, clean, geometric blocks depict scenes of people and architecture in the artists’ signature colour palette of calming pastel tones. Nkosi uses oil on canvas, carefully layering her compositions over time in a process she likens to meditation.
Nkosi’s sophomore solo exhibition Landings is expected to deliver visuals akin to her signature graphic style. With her pared-down shapes and blocked colour zones, Nkosi seeks the power of stories told with the minimum information necessary. In these works – paintings, prints and a sound installation – conceived during the accelerated crises of the past year, the artist zooms alternately in and out to examine multiple meanings of safety and ground.
(Pictured): Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi painting a piece from her sophomore exhibition ‘Landings’
The figurative works in the show are predominantly studies of human connection. Working within the aesthetic territory mapped out in her previous exhibition Gymnasium, Nkosi here moves away from a concern with the individual’s experience to focus on the shared encounter: pairs or small groups hold (and hold on to) one another.
(Pictured order of appearance): Artworks from the ‘Gymnasium’ exhibition ‘Amplitude’ & ‘Salute’
(Pictured): Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi preparing artworks piece for her debut solo exhibition ‘Gymnasium”
‘On a given day I may attempt many manoeuvres. Sometimes a manoeuvre is made up of one or two moves. Perhaps this sort of purely descriptive account can be read as a non-judgmental gaze on my day, allowing me to see my own actions and work without unnecessary self-criticism or analysis’ explains Thenjiwe. She adds, “In that space, the difference between chaos and order, success and failure becomes indistinct.”
In Landings, Nkosi asks what we can be for each other when the ground is breaking apart beneath our feet. How do we find each other? How do we hold on to one another? Where can we land?
