​Contemporary South African Art

Article credits to: E.J. de Jager

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Mhlaba Zwelidumile Mxgasi Feni, better known simply as Dumile, is one of Africa's greatest contemporary artists. He was born in 1942 at Worcester in the Cape Province. According to other records he was born on 21 May 1939. After his mother's death in 1948 the family moved to Cape Town and later, when Dumile was about eleven years old, to Johannesburg. Here he worked for his father who was a trader and a preacher.

His talent was first noticed in 1964 while he was receiving treatment at the Charles Hurwitz SANTA Tuberculosis Hospital in Johannesburg, where he made drawings all over the walls of the centre. His exceptional, spontaneous and inherent talent was helped along by several persons who took an interest in the young Dumile. Ngatane gave him some instruction and also took him to the Jubilee Art Centre where he spent several weeks with Cecil Skotnes who introduced him to the medium of conte and helped him to develop his drawing techniques. He then went to live and work at the studio of Bill Ainslie where he also began his first sculptures. He was also greatly assisted by Madame Haenggi, from the then well known Gallery 101, Johannesburg, who also provided him with art materials.

In 1968 he went abroad and lived for many years in London in self-imposed exile. He occasionally visited the U.S.A., for example, when he went across as a visiting artist in residence at the African Humanities Institute, University of California at Los Angeles, 1979-1980. He later lived in New York until his death in 1991; where he designed record covers, book illustrations, etc. In his South African years he signed his work simply as ‘Dumile’, but later they were signed as ‘Mhlaba Dumile-Feni’.

Dumile was both a sculptor and an excellent draughtsman. His drawings in particular, have won him great acclaim. The content of these drawings were based on social realism, dealing chiefly with the social conditions and problems affecting the Black man's identity in the urban South African setting. He was exceedingly successful in finding powerful and original pictorial equivalents with which to express his deep emotional feelings on this subject.

His art is characterized by a distortion stemming from tremendous emotion, and to some extent his work belongs to the art of the fantastic. The drawings are characterized by great vitality, freedom from the limitations of reason, and the absence of any aesthetic pre-occupations. They were executed spontaneously, according to the artist's subconscious thoughts and vision. They are, nevertheless, comprehensible, and for the viewer infused with poignant significance.

The human figure is of prime importance in Dumile's drawings, as is the successful manner in which these figures give utterance to emotions and feelings. By means of posture, gestures, rhythm, in short, patterns of body configuration, these figures express inner and spiritual experiences. The appearance of the figures, and the distorted style in which they were drawn, fulfill a specific function, namely heightening the sensation of the emotions that they depict.



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