This early work by Sam Nhlengethwa captures the quintessential 20th-century metropolitan experience of reading a broadsheet newspaper on a city bench – only in this case, form and subject combine; the medium is the message. The newspaper that is being read by the central figure in the scene depicted is actual newsprint – a collage element in a work that combines fragments of torn up newspapers and magazines with painted aspects.

It was at the Bill Ainslie Studios/Johannesburg Art Foundation in the late 1970s that Nhlengethwa took up collage. ‘There was plenty of available material in the form of newspapers and magazines, so I felt comfortable with the collage technique,’ he reflects. Bill encouraged me to explore the technique further and to work on a larger scale.’

SOURCE
Koloane, David. 2006. ‘Collective Exchange and the Politics of Space 1976 – 1995,’ in Sam Nhlengethwa, ed. Kathryn Smith, Johannesburg: Goodman, 46. Gallery Editions.

This large-scale work depicts a busy intersection in downtown Johannesburg in which the segregated public toilets and telephone booths have been foregrounded through the medium of collage. An iconic Volkswagen Beetle, symbol of the free love and experimentation that defined the ‘Swinging Sixties’, is featured in the foreground as a kind of ironic nod to those values. Instead, the sprawling street scene depicted here captures the atmosphere of repressiveness, social control and civic unrest that undercut urban life in South Africa at the height of apartheid.

The title of the work, ‘Johannesburg Building Society’, and the focus on the grand buildings that once occupied Johannesburg’s downtown financial district, might be understood as a wry critique of the capitalist underpinnings of urban apartheid.

This work formed part of the exhibition Glimpses of the Fifties and Sixties (2004) at Goodman Gallery. Explaining his thinking behind the show, Nhlengethwa said: ‘This exhibition is a culmination of a thought that began 10 years ago. Perhaps on some subconscious level it is very fitting that parallel to this show is the year we celebrate 10 years of democracy… I have chosen to work in the style to which I have become accustomed (collage) and to also explore my printing via the photogravure process. I think one of the reasons I like this process is that it has an element of collage in it, but the process is more physically involved and delicate. It entails digitizing an initial collage and working through at least five plates before even considering the trial print to be used for the series.

‘I sourced material from the Drum magazine archives and I also looked through my own family albums. The use of my own archive was important because I wanted to reflect an intimacy and a familiarity that would make the images accessible… I think I’m lucky in the sense that I have used art as an outlet for the frustrations I encountered during this time. My visual expression through painting was therapeutic and has now been transformed into what I believe to be a historical retrospective.’

SOURCE:
http://www.goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/499

This charcoal drawing of a cabbage field shows a building that most likely provides rudimentary lodgings to farm workers.

‘True to his working class roots, Nhlengethwa has never shied away from the concept of labour in his work, which, from his Mine Trip series (1996) right up to Townships Revisited (2006), regularly features everyday South Africans going about their work,’ writes Alexandra Dodd.

‘Why farm workers? Why miners? These are the people who feed us the vegetables we eat, who dig the gold that is the wealth of our country,’ Nhlengethwa says. ‘It’s an attempt to bring a picture of these people close to the eyes of the society. It’s our job as artists. Just like journalists, we must bring stories to the public – to make the big picture of what’s going on in South Africa a human story – to humanise it.’

SOURCE:
Dodd, Alexandra. 2006. ‘Jazz and the Retrieval of Lost Histories,’ in Sam Nhlengethwa, ed. Kathryn Smith, Johannesburg: Goodman Gallery Editions, 84.

Exhibited as part of Nhlengethwa’s exhibition Glimpses of the Fifties and Sixties (2006) at Goodman Gallery, this photo lithograph uses the technique of collage to home in on a particular scene against the backdrop of a train stop that is so overcrowded the platform is not even visible; perhaps there isn’t even a platform. The public safety of the commuters does not appear to be a priority. Instead, the attention of the authorities seems focused on policing and control. In the foreground, two men have been stopped by a policeman in colonial-style hardhat, who is checking their passbooks.

This early drawing pre-figures Nhlengethwa’s interest in the places people move through and the spaces they inhabit. In this instance, his subject is a humble rural shack – a documentation of the kind of living conditions he encountered during his time studying at Rorke’s Drift Art Centre in northern Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) in the 1970s.

In 2001, Sam Nhlengethwa and Zwelethu Mthethwa worked on a series of collaborative pieces, which were exhibited at Goodman Gallery.

‘While such a pairing had the potential to produce wayward results, Nhlengethwa’s familiarity with the photo image seemed to come in useful. The completed series mixed collage, canvas and photographic process, capably melding the aesthetic concerns of these two seemingly incongruous artists,’ wrote Sean O’Toole in Artthrob.

Later, the two artists worked collaboratively on a number works: Mthethwa’s well-known photographic portraits were collaged, recomposed and altered by Nhlengethwa to create new interpretations and meanings.

This work is arguably one of their most successful collaborative works as it is almost impossible to tell where the photograph ends and the collage elements begin; the two media merge seamlessly to capture the liquidity of the sea.

SOURCE:
http://www.artthrob.co.za/03oct/artbio.html