October 9, 2002
By Thomas Thale
SHE was the first black, female artist to exhibit her work in a gallery, and now, 30 years since her last exhibition, Gladys Mgudlandlu's celebrated art works have made a spectacular return to the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Opened on Sunday, her exhibition features, on one hand, colourful portraits of human figures, homesteads and birds - against a pastoral backdrop - and, on the other, recreations of contemporary Cape Town, with its mountains and shanties. Mgudlandlu described her art as a mixture of expressionism and impressionism.
Feeding Time: Two enlarged birds in an attack mode against the backdrop of a menacing sky
Most of her paintings are textured recreations of scenes from her traditional Fingo background. There are renditions of Xhosa women, dressed in traditional attire, smoking pipes, of girls carrying fire-wood on their heads, of huts and of the rocky landscape of her childhood. Mgudlandlu was clearly at home evoking this rural milieu because she knew it so intimately. Her only concession to the urban landscape is "Nyanga" and "District Six" which portray these neighbourhoods as arid and full of shanties.
These reconstructions of village life in its pristine innocence did not endear Mgudlandlu to her more politicised contemporaries. Bessie Head, the most prolific African female writer of the time, dismissed Mgudlandlu's art as "escapist". Painting in the 1960s, in the aftermath of the banning of political formations and against a repressive political climate, she nevertheless was not given to political posturing.
At the opening of her exhibition, Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile, deputy director of strategic support in the Department of Arts, Culture and Heritage Services in the city, defended Mgudlandlu against these charges, noting that "her detractors accused her of being escapist, but, as you can see, her work is vibrant and clearly has political undertones". He hailed her as a pioneer who tackled political themes in a more "nuanced" way. "The shacks of Nyanga that she sketched are a political statement. She is the only South African to have painted a portrait of Patrice Lumumba, then the prime minister of Congo, the first African country to gain independence from a colonial power."
Fetching wood: this picture of women carrying fire wood on their heads is typical of Mgudlandlu's evocation of the rural landscape
Mgudlandlu experimented with various media. In her work, she used pencil, crayon, water-colour, ink, felt nib pens and later, oils. Most of the works on display are gouache on paper.
A self-taught artist who worked as a teacher, first in Athlone and later in Nyanga, she was born round about 1920 in the Peddie district of Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape but moved to the Western Cape, where she passed away in 1979.
The exhibition will go on a nationwide tour and two education supplements, to go with the exhibition, will be distributed to schools. It closes at the Johannesburg Art Gallery on 5 January 2003. It will then be taken to the National Museum in Bloemfontein from 19 May to 23 June 2003. Other venues will be confirmed later.
Permission to use web site material
Publishers may use material from this site free of charge, as long as:
- Credit is given to either the "City of Johannesburg website
(www.joburg.org.za)" or to "Johannesburg News Agency
(www.joburg.org.za)";
- If the article is used online, a link is provided to the original
article on this website;
- The name of the article's author is acknowledged;
-
The webmaster is informed of how and where the material is used (fill
in this brief online form).
Johannesburg News Agency is operated by BIG Media at 011-484-1400 |
