Artist Database

Born in 1962 in KwaZulu-Natal, Sandile Zulu studied at the Rorke’s Drift Art Centre, Natal Technikon, and the University of Witwatersrand. His work is most often abstract, sometimes sculptural, and makes use of found objects and materials that he burns, scorches and scalds, using fire as both a constructive and a destructive medium in his artmaking. He has exhibited extensively since the early 1990s in solo and group exhibitions locally and in the United States, the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, and Belgium. Zulu is represented in private and public collections around the world, including the Museum for African Art, New York, Iziko National Gallery, Cape Town, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, as well as in the Vodacom, Sasol, MTN and Deutsche Securities corporate collections. His solo exhibitions include ARTOMS: Histopathology, Regeneration and Other Cases at SMAC Gallery in Stellenbosch in 2012, and Fire This Time: Planetary Circle, at the October Gallery, London, in 2005. Zulu also featured in the Artists in Dialogue Series at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington in 2011, and is the subject of the book TAXI-012 Sandile ZULU, published by David Krut in 2005. Zulu has received many awards, including the President's Award Grand Prize in the Seychelles Biennale of Contemporary Art in 1998.