​Contemporary South African Art

Percy Ndithembile Konqobe was born in 1939 in Nigel, South Africa. He was initiated as a sangoma in the mid 1960s and has since practised in Soweto as a healer. He began giving form to his dreams and visions in clay in the late 1980s, thanks to the urging of the sculptor Sydney Kumalo. He is today a recognised sculptor, whose works are attracting growing interest internationally.

Konqobe is a man of dreams. There are dreams that come by day and those that plague his nights, demanding to be vividly remembered. The recurrence of these dreams does not make them easy to capture in solid works of art. On the contrary, they demand to be captured with linear clarity and tactile accuracy and, to make it more demanding, they must breathe the spirits of the ancestors that commissioned them.

Konqobe is also a man in love with form, and has a great ability to capture these forms. The lines of his sculptures are lyrical and tactile. His choice of medium is deliberate: clay is soil and soil is the abode of the ancestors. To touch and shape it becomes an act of communication with ancestral forces that guard and guide his creativity and destiny.
What then happens when he casts his artworks? Does he imprison the spirits of his ancestors? Konqobe answers: "The bronzes are evidence to the world of the visitations of the ancestors' messengers that draw attention to my gods."

His works are testaments to a force beyond him and beyond his time. It is clear that, in order for those born outside Konqobe's worldview to experience his works more profoundly, they must enter into a pact with their minds to suspend disbelief. Yet even if one rejects this suspension of disbelief, Konqobe's works of art stand alone as masterpieces that speak an eloquent language of sculpture.

 

Professor Pitika P. Ntuli, with Jenny Gsell GmbH, Amy Klement & Caroline Gutberlet