Artists

South African 1941- 2018

Azaria Mbatha is considered one of the most significant South African graphic artists, and was the first African graphic artist to have work included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mbatha is best known for his intricately detailed narrative linocuts with a distinctly African sensibility. He based his work on religious themes from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, using biblical text as a metaphor for sociopolitical commentary.

Mbatha was born in Mahlabatini in rural KwaZulu-Natal in 1941, and was educated at the local primary and secondary schools. He received his initial art training under Swedish missionary Peder Gowenuis at the Evangelical Lutheran Art and Craft Centre at Umpumulo, and later at Rorke’s Drift.

In 1965 Mbatha was awarded a two-year scholarship to the Konstfachskolan in Stockholm, Sweden, where he studied printmaking, etching, mural painting and he designed tapestries. On completion of his scholarship, he returned briefly to South Africa where he taught at the Art Centre at Rorke’s Drift, before going into self-exile in Sweden in 1969.

Mbatha received a significant number of public commissions for murals throughout KwaZulu-Natal and South Africa, and a number of awards, including the Art South Africa Today prize in 1965 and as a prize winner on the 1982 Bradford Art Biennale. Mbatha exhibited extensively throughout Europe and South Africa in both group and solo exhibitions, and his work is represented in all major public collections throughout South Africa, and internationally, including prestigious collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, USA, and the National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

Mbatha died in Sweden in 2018.