Thokozani Mthiyane

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.
"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 existence".
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.
Articles
Thokozani Mthinyane a gifted story teller

Currently in this studio I am working on several series, 10 actually at the same time. That is how I work and that is why you can see there are lots of art works dealing with different themes at different stages of creation. I work like that. Once an idea comes, I do straight and work on it and then go back to the other idea again and again,” he says. It is obvious that this artist works mainly with discarded material as there is quite a lot of them in his studio, mainly organic material, even though he says, he sometimes works with non-degradable material such as plastic.
Thokozani Mthinyane X Mail & Guardian

On Thokozani Mthiyane’s walls, among photographs, heirlooms and works in progress, is a series of almost life-size oil portraits on canvases. They are faces without bodies, their heads sometimes slightly bent, the faces elongated like rugby balls on kicking tees. Blotches of colour section off fragments of the faces, with yellow emerging often as the dominant layer.
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Letters from the Masquerades I
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- Thokozani Mthinyane
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Letters from the Masquerades II
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A letter from Beijing
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- Thokozani Mthinyane
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The return of the Spirits Diptych
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- Thokozani Mthinyane
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The Ancestors | An avant garde South African band
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- Thokozani Mthinyane
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Dialectics of the Spirits I
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- Thokozani Mthinyane
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Dialectics of the Spirits II
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- Thokozani Mthinyane
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Dialectics of the Spirits III
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- Thokozani Mthinyane
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Dialectics of the Spirits IV
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- Thokozani Mthinyane
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Dialectics of the Spirits V
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- Thokozani Mthinyane
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