Artist Database

Papytsho Mafolo (born in 1977 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, lives and works in Brussels, Belgium) is a visual artist who works across a range of media and whose practice explores the relationships between cultural identity, human behaviour, and historical memory.

His work is particularly concerned with African societies shaped by population displacement, the colonial legacy, and resilience. Drawing on his Congolese heritage and personal experience of migration, Mafolo reflects on how identities fragment, reconfigure themselves, and endure over time.

Working primarily in drawing and painting, Mafolo is known for his dense, linear, and highly detailed surfaces, in which fragmented bodies appear — often as hybrid forms combining human and animal elements — and recur throughout his work. These figures function as metaphors for cultures and identities subjected to forms of external hegemony and historical rupture. His compositions are built through the accumulation of lines and marks, with each detail acting as a vignette or chapter within a broader narrative structure, emphasising continuity, survival, and transformation.

Mafolo trained at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Institute of Fine Arts in Kinshasa before broadening his technical practice through studies in digital and visual technologies in Spain. His work has been exhibited in numerous countries across Africa, Europe, and North America, including solo exhibitions at the Judizmendi Cultural Center in Vitoria-Gasteiz (2016), Espace Mushagalusha in
Montreal (2014), and TMB Bank in Kinshasa (2013). His work has also appeared in group and curated exhibitions, including at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. (2019), and in London, Paris, Cape Town, and Johannesburg.

Mafolo has received several distinctions recognising his artistic commitment, including awards from UNESCO, the Rotary Club, and various cultural institutions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Africa. Through an ever-evolving and experimental practice, Mafolo continues to explore themes of destruction and renewal, developing a visual language in which catastrophe gives way to reconstruction and new forms emerge from loss.