​Contemporary South African Art

Banele Khoza was in born in 1994 in Hlatikulu in Eswatini. During high school, he moved to South Africa and is now based in Tshwane. He studied at the London International School of Fashion for a year, studying Fashion Design. Dismayed by the limited opportunities to draw he transferred to study Fine Arts at Tshwane University of Technology. On completion of his degree, he taught Drawing as well as Art Theory at the same institution. In 2018 he decided to stop teaching to work as a full-time artist and to launch the multi-purpose studio and gallery BKhz in Keyes Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg.

Khoza’s lithographs, demonstrate his skill and dexterity. His ability to embrace the unknown and to immerse himself in the technical possibilities of what lithography has to offer combined with the skills of master printer Mark Attwood have resulted in prints that reveal the artist’s gifts.

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Khoza worked on stone and grained film using a combination of pencil, litho crayon and ink and tusche washes. The delicate traces of the dried ink, Khoza’s choice of colours and drawing abilities combine to delight the eye. Khoza has been a keen draftsman since the age of five, drawing images of the toys that he wanted but which his conservative parents refused to get for him. This sense of longing and vulnerability can be seen in Khoza’s lithographs.

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Obsessively neat and detailed text weaves through some of the prints, but often one cannot read all of the words. It is if the artist entices one into his private world and then stops one from fully accessing it, questioning the viewer’s motives for the intrusion. Khoza’s journals are an integral part of his practice and are reflected in his image-making “I have never seen so many sharp pencils” is some of the text included in one of his lithographs. Khoza’s interest in the private and the public merges with his interest in social media, technology, connection/disconnection, isolation and a longing to be whole and completely present with someone as well as with oneself.

Khoza’s three most recent lithographs explore a longing for connection and a wariness of self-criticism.

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His earlier prints Dear Olympia (a reclining nude with two cats) and Don’t forget the tomatoes (from the first set of lithographs that he did) remind one of everyday routines. In the six two-colour prints faces and bodies are alluded to, the delicacy of the washes contrasting with the boldness of the forms. And just as things seem to be getting serious the text and titles pull one back with a sense of delight and quirkiness