Notes

Contradiction and conflict serve as undercurrents in the paintings of Misheck Masamvu: an antagonism rages between abstraction and figuration as distorted figures transmute out of raging landscapes. While violent motion is depicted in the brush strokes and paintwork, there is a sense of immovability – as if the figures are trapped within torrents of painted land, caught within their own past and their own circumstance. He speaks of each painting as a proposal for a new reality, an arena for him to work through personal hopes and frustrations but also to offer alternatives, for himself and others, to the constraints and constructs of daily reality. 

Source: Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.