Thokozani Mthiyane is a Johannesburg based artist. Mthiyane grew up in Cleremont Township near Durban, where after leaving school he would pass time in the studios of artists Sfiso KaMkame and Thami Jali, watching them work. He has been largely influenced by his time spent under the tutelage of artists Sfiso KaMkame and Thami Jali. Mthiyane has experience in children’s theatre with the Madcap’s Educational Theatre Company, after which he had his first solo exhibition at the Flat Gallery in Durban. Mthiyane is a multidisciplinary artist, who speaks with as much confidence about his work as an expressionist painter as he does about his time as a trilingual poet in France and as a dancer touring Holland with the Inzalo dance company. He has exhibited at the Centre for humanities research, and has exhibited at African noise foundation. In 2017 he had a solo show with Art Eye Gallery, show titled "Soul songs: The shape of my head." He has also exhibited with Undiscovered Canvas, In Cannes. He developed his signature act of performing French poetry translated into Zulu in Cave Poésie in Toulouse, Southern France. He returned to France in 2001 and again in 2004 to perform the poems of Jacques Prévert in the small town of Heroville near Normandy.
Mthiyane’s artistic flare stems from his creative combination of painting and poetry. He has exhibited for Alliance Françoise and Resolution Gallery in Johannesburg. In 2015 he had a solo exhibition titled “Whetin dey happen Lagos/ Jozi” at Mzansi Gallery Johannesburg South Africa. In 2016 his artwork was published in The Imbali Artbooks: Adventuring into art, which is part of a syllabus. In 2017 he had his first solo show at Art Eye Gallery titled Soul songs the shape of my head. Mthiyane’s work is a spontaneous culmination of happenings which are lead purely by the artists feeling toward his canvas. His multicultural aesthetic is drawn from his desire for travel and connection to countries all over the world. This consumption and cultivation of other cultural influences and practices is somehow the place on which the works elaboration exists.The works hold narratives referencing his experiences through love, spirituality, music and painting. So much of his process involves combining these influences through physical objects and brush stoke. Mthiyane’s works are inherently physically apart of the contexts they come from, as much of his process includes the use of found objects in and around which ever context he finds himself in.
ARTIST STATEMENT
It does not matter any longer to ponder on how I began to paint, draw and create object attributed as art writing poetry and the assemble of other words. All I can attest to is that my activity as an artist has widened, deepened my sensibility about being and becoming and the very experience of being alive. it is why I make art in the image of the world that i see and experience which has persistently given me the urgency to express myself into a meaningful existance.
My experiences are organic but they also come from books and oral stories from all the countries I have put my foot on; be it religious, artistic, ritualistic and all that points to a spiritual experience in gathering and hybridizing these human gestures into a narrative. The body of work I am working on is the creation of abstract pieces whose essence lies in memory and becoming.My subject matter varies, I create work from a non-representable, spiritual form and cultural life from all human pursuits such as figurative masks , portraits of souls, human gestures represented in music, abstractions and symbols which are the essence of my being as an artist and a person. Spirit quest, 2019 Oil on fabriano paperIt is therapy as it is pain and joy from the human groans to the echoes where the song becomes that kind of blue and other tones; visual poetry on the inner self that is at times is unknown to me as a painter. The constant visions of masks and masquerades whose turmoil in my head are a reflection of the outside world and my inner world.Essentially my quest as an artist is to enhance my aesthetic in the context of my identity by way of creating personal poetic journeys and an uncharted third world space in the universe. The outside world is there as a raw material object for me to tune into, to chime with my innate world and vice–versa, at times the darkness of being is just that and it would be just as easily to paint black canvases so as to reflect the state I’m in and yet the metaphysical nature of art creation turns to yield an enlightening experience.