Kagiso Pat MAUTLOA (b. 1952)
Weekend
2008
mixed media and found objects on canvas
144 x 55 cm
Weekend offers the viewer an illuminated glimpse of a city street through the window of a fundamentally furnished interior. The SABC Art Collection houses four artworks by Mautloa: Room (1998); Portrait of a Child (1999); Shackscape (1997)… Continue Reading
Portrait of a Child
1999
pastel on paper
Portrait of a Child resonates with psychological depth. This is not a shiny, happy portrait of a child at play. Rather, this vigorously sketched, distorted visage reminds us that childhood can also be tainted with intense struggle.
Room
1995
oil on canvas
Room offers a glimpse of a low-rent, urban interior. It is as if the bed is on fire, calling to mind the shack fires that frequently rage through South Africa’s informal settlements taking lives and homes in their wake. Even the door frame appears… Continue Reading
Shackscape
1997
mixed media
78 x 100 cm
Mautloa works in painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking, frequently building found objects and discarded scraps salvaged from the city streets into his artworks, so that their surfaces evoke the industrial textures and gritty materiality… Continue Reading
BIOGRAPHY
Kagiso Patrick Mautloa was born in 1952 in Ventersdorp, in what was then the Western Transvaal (now North West Province). His family moved to Soweto in 1954. He studied art at the Mofolo Art Centre in Soweto under the guidance of Dan Rakgoate, and at Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre in KwaZulu-Natal.
In 1992, he left his job in the graphic design studio at the SABC to become a full-time artist.
As an emeritus artist at one of the city’s most longstanding and legendary studio spaces, The Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in Fordsburg, Mautloa is immersed in the urban life of downtown Johannesburg, which he studies up-close, incorporating physical remnants and shards of the city itself into his distinctive, richly coloured artworks. He infuses urban-industrial detritus with an existential load that alludes to the tough, makeshift aspect of so many lives in the African metropolis: women roasting mielies (corn) over coal-fired tin braziers on street corners, the wholesalers and hawkers selling cheap imports from the Far East, the street traders who eke out a living with a few items on a small board near the busy intersections. Figurative elements, abstract textures and multiple colour overlays are important parts of his work. Mautloa is as comfortable with abstract work as he is with more figurative imagery. Most of his work is in oils and acrylic, but he has also included found objects and collage in his two dimensional work and has made a number of installations as well as doing photographic work.
Working alongside David Koloane, Bill Ainslie and other South African artists, he was a co-founder of the Thupelo Workshops in 1985; which would later become part of the International Triangle Network. Mautloa also taught at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) and played an instrumental role in the Thupelo Gallery.
In 2019, he was honoured with the Helgaard Steyn Award for Painting. Mautloa has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and his work is represented in several important public collections in South Africa.