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Mpai, Clifford

Born 1937, Polokwane, Limpopo Province. 

 

Clifford Mpai was the Oppenheimer family’s gardener at Little Brenthurst in Johannesburg.

 

His talent and his industriousness as a draughtsman resulted in densely-worked pencil and crayon drawings of garden landscapes and suburban environments. These have a unique charm. Spatial ambiguities, with a tendency to flatten forms and arrange them parallel to the picture-plane, are a central feature of his work. Mpai’s work has enjoyed wide recognition not only through its inclusion on some important exhibitions, but also in the fact that he is today represented in South Africa’s major public collections.

 

Woman cooking (plate 43) in the Campbell Smith Collection is atypical of Mpai’s usual subject matter, and a somewhat idiosyncratic inclusion. Human figures are seldom evident in Mpai’s oeuvre. This representation of what appears to be a white woman presiding over a huge two-legged potjie set over a log fire in an interior space is unusual indeed.

 

Mpai’s reputation emerged during the turbulent late 1980s and early 1990s at a time when most black artists of note were producing work that was urgent and highly political in nature. His apolitical work, with its visions of a suburban Garden of Eden, stood apart from that of the mainstream at this time. This fact did not go unnoticed by critics such as Ivor Powell, who reviewed his exhibition at the Karen McKerron Gallery in 1994.

 

Recognising the black South African artist’s personal right to transcend the immediate demands of political circumstance, and linking him to other great artists of unique and personal vision, Powell concluded that ‘Mpai’s drawings represent the resounding triumph of the naïve sensibility over the complexities of 20th-century consciousness.

 

Training Entirely self-taught. Exhibitions 1994: We the Peoples – United for Global Environment, Pretoria Art Museum. 1994: Displacements – South African works on paper, North West University, Chicago, USA. 1995: Panoramas of passage; exhibition of South African landscapes touring the USA. 1994 and 1995: Karen McKerron Art Gallery, Bryanston, Johannesburg. 2007; Solo show at Tokara Wine Estate, Helshoogte Pass, Stellenbosch, curated by Julia Meintjies.Collections Iziko SA National Gallery; Durban Art Gallery; Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg; Johannesburg Art Gallery; Standard Bank Collection.

 

Reference:  http://www.revisions.co.za/biographies/clifford-mpai/#.VaUJpDjbKtU 

Colourful drawings and a colourful life. Depending on whether you believe his mother or his grandfather, Clifford was born in 1937 or 1940 - near Pietersburg, now Polokwane. After leaving school at 14, he worked at the Modderfontein Dynamite Factory and at a dry-cleaner in Sasolburg before finding a job as a waiter at Little Brenthurst, the Oppenheimers' Parktown home. In 1984, his talent was recognised by Strilli Oppenheimer who enrolled him for weekly art classes at Bill Anslie's Johannesburg Art Foundation. Strilli's encouragement, together with the classes, gave Clifford the confidence to become an artist.

 

When other black artists in the 1980s and 1990s were producing political works, Clifford specialized in pencil and crayon drawings of garden landscapes and of the suburbs surrounding Brenthurst. His style was often to draw from an angled or aerial perspective and, according to Karen McKerron, to create a world of structured fantasy. His observation of light shadow, outline, flattened forms and detail created an almost soundless world, in which he combined his urban surroundings with those of his rural upbringing. He changed the scale too, rather than sticking to an accepted one-point view.

 

Notable exhibitions of Clifford's work have been held at the Karen McKerron Gallery in 1988, at the Standard Bank Gallery in 1997, at Tokara Winery (curated by Julia Meintjes) in 2007, and a retrospective called "Two Worlds in Four Decades" at the Liebrecht Gallery in Somerset West in 2014.

These days, while his work is represented in public, corporate and private collections, Clifford is happily retired. He's back where he started, in Phoffu Village just outside Polokwane, still recording the changing world around him in his rural home environment, in lead and coloured pencil.

 

Ref:  http://www.juliameintjes.co.za/view_artists.asp?pg=artists&exCode=Mpai%20Ex

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