Artist Database

David Koloane was a pioneer black modernist artist during the South African apartheid era and played a huge role in contemporary South African art as an artist, writer, cultural critic, and curator. He was a co-founder of the Thupelo workshop program and the Fordsburg Artists’ Studios, famously known as ‘The Bag Factory’. In his paintings, drawings, and collages he made an oblique socio-political commentary on South Africa’s difficult past and the poverty experienced in townships. He is best known for his paintings and drawings of abstracted Johannesburg landscapes and the scavenger dogs he refers to as ‘Mgodoyi’. He was honoured with a retrospective exhibition that was shown at the Standard Bank Art Gallery in Johannesburg and Iziko National Gallery in Cape Town in 2019. He held numerous exhibitions and received many prestigious local and international awards.