Artist Database

Ephraim Ngatane was born in Lesotho and raised in Soweto, and in 1952 he began attending classes at the Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg run by Cecil Skotnes. He became a teacher at the Jubilee Art Centre in the company of Durant Sihlali after Polly Street was closed down, teaching artists Louis Maqhubela and Ben Macala. While undergoing treatment for tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Soweto he befriended Dumile Feni and the two artists painted murals for the institution. In his own work he concentrated on oil painting, documenting the politically-charged everyday reality of township life under the apartheid regime, but increasingly experimented with greater painterliness and abstraction later in his short career.