Provenance

Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, 2017.

Private Collection.

Notes

Since moving to Los Angeles in 2016, Simphiwe Ndzube has taken an interest in portraying masculine cultural rituals enacted by working-class Zulu dandies known as Swenkas and Xhosa initiates, Amakrwala. Although steeped in cultural ritual, Ndzube’s aim as a painter is to abstract the specific. Often adorned with three-dimensional embellishments, in the present lot, a tie, his paintings translate cultural experience into surreal and metaphoric statements of black life.

His vibrant Los Angeles paintings of prancing figures, of which Transitory Dance is a fine example, also have a strong basis in literature. Ndzube has used the literary term magical realis” in relation to this work. The swollen and attenuated figures of his early Los Angeles paintings have made likenesses in world literature, including the inebriate narrator of Amos Tutuola's novel The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), Shakespeare’s fat and boastful Knight Sir John Falstaff, and Alfred Jarry’s grotesquely comical King Ubu. Unlike Jarry, Ndzube is less jaded about his fantastical figures. As in his own life story, resilience and transformation is central to their being.

Ndzube has had numerous solo exhibitions both locally and abroad and has completed a number of prestigious residencies. His work is included in public collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon; Iziko South African National Gallery, Zeitz MOCAA, Denver Art Museum and the Rubell Museum.