Umkhokeli

“I recycle good pieces out of the past and create something that is new”

Nicholas Hlobo (video by Al Todd).

I am thrilled to see that Nicholas Hlobo is finally having his first gallery solo exhibtion in New York City at Lehman Maupin. I can report that his health scare a couple years ago has done nothing to squelch his imagination, talent and the ambitious scale of his work.

Mixed media on canvas paintings hung on the walls and leather and wood sculptures sprawled on the floor combined to create a provocative and unsettling installation.

Nicholas Hlobo likes to play with a wide range of materials. He typically weaves and stitches satin ribbon, rubber, and in this case soft leather and creates intricate, seductively tactile drawings and soft and amorphous sculptures.

Here two fantastic hard to define creatures are sprawled on the floor of the gallery. A large piece of driftwood to which is attached a bull’s horn made out of stitched leather makes me think of a ram’s head and feels a touch aggressive. It conveys masculinity yet held in check by the attached trailing tentacles entwined with each other made out of brown soft leather. These feel fluid and yielding, sensuous and more resonant of ocean creatures. Is this a land creature or a water creature? It seems to be both to my eyes. Hlobo here is referencing eels whose migratory patterns become a metaphor for the artist’s personal creative journey who must let go of all secure mooring or traditional references to create. These hybrid creatures reflect Hlobo’s constant challenge to identifiers such as ritual, sexual orientation, gender and nationality.

I notice a change in the way he deals with leather in two of his mixed media canvases. Leather ( or animal hide)  has been given a greater role. No longer tightly contained by the stitching like in his earlier canvases, -we can see a beautiful example on one of the walls – the leather now has been allowed to have a life of its own. It increasingly takes over the surface of the canvas, at times hanging loosely while at other times it acts like a live organism distorting the canvas as it pulls it away from its original flatness. It is as if the modernist focus on the flatness of the canvas is being literally challenged by an alternative African aesthetic.  His trade mark stitching is still present but plays a secondary role.

Well represented by the Stevenson gallery in South Africa Hlobo has had a long history of institutional exhibitions in Europe, Australia, and in the States. It was high time that he had local representation in New York.