Southern Guild Los Angeles is pleased to present ‘Like a Fish in the Water’, a solo exhibition by South African artist Terence Maluleke. Marking his first solo exhibition in the United States, this series of new paintings is a vivid development of Maluleke’s personal and religious symbology, exploring themes of self-determination, community, ritual and artistic freedom. ‘Like a Fish in the Water’ is a reckoning with his faith and expression of the desire for a life inscribed with agency and meaning. A visual storyteller whose language marries a graphic sensibility with elements of traditional figuration, Maluleke draws heavily on motifs from both Christian theology and indigenous African spirituality. A golden halo that could also be read as a crown of thorns features prominently in many of the paintings, alongside copies of the Bible, a blue candle that his church gave to him as a child and various timber sculptures of fish. Alongside the association with Jesus and the miraculous catching of fish in the Gospels, the latter is deployed in homage to the late visionary South African sculptor Jackson Hlungwani, with whom Maluleke shares a deep spiritual and artistic connection.
The two artists are of Tsonga heritage, a Bantu ethnic group primarily native to Southern Mozambique and South Africa, and trace their origins to nearby villages in the Limpopo province f South Africa. Maluleke’s father was baptised by Hlungwani and he visited the late sculptor’s studio and compound as a child. The revered artist and pastor gave Maluleke’s family a wooden carving of a fish, a subject he portrayed prolifically throughout his life as a representation of abundance, life and harmony between humans and nature. Maluleke titled this body of work after the sculptor’s habitual reply as a tribute to Hlungwani. In the starkness of their rendition, focus on foreground action against a flat background, and narrative impact, the works in this exhibition are reminiscent of traditional iconographic paintings. Maluleke’s palette is more subdued than earlier paintings, with a prevalence of golden/mustard hues, enlivened with an experimental approach to mark-making and inclusion of unconventional materials such as glitter. In contrast to the didacticism of religious art, however, he injects his own individual point of view and an ambiguous approach to meaning. He has cultivated a vocabulary of forms with personal significance that recur throughout his oeuvre – including calla lilies, which he describes as communicating the push and pull between strength and fragility; portraits of his sister Nozipho, whom he regards as an extension of himself; and the ‘lêkê’ plastic jelly sandal, which featured heavily in his first solo exhibition at Southern Guild, ‘Grace in Grand Bassam‘.
‘Blue Dance’ depicts a crowd of worshippers clothed in the blue and white uniforms of the Apostolic and African Zionist churches, surrounding a haloed figure as inspired by the memory of physical energy experienced at a recent church service. A painting of a red-roofed house with a halo hovering above it also invites multiple readings. The work envisions the artist’s lifelong dream to build his own home – a place of refuge and warmth, blessed by divine intervention. The building in this work is intact but the paint drips down from its walls and windows, as if the structure is dissolving. Birth, death, sacrifice, transcendence – Maluleke depicts the arc of human struggle and contemplates the pursuit of purpose and connection. His faith encompasses the creation of his own cosmology free from the strictures of doctrine and the confines of Western conceptions of formalised religion. His artistic practice is a pilgrimage of sorts, an insistence on the redemptive power of the imagination and a dreaming into being of his highest ideals. ‘Like a Fish in the Water’ opens on the 21st of November 2024 and will run until the 1sr of February 2025 at Southern Guild Los Angeles, it will run concurrently with two other exhibitions: ‘Mbare Opera’ by Wycliffe Mundopa and ‘Methods of Flight’ by Zimbabwean artistic du Amanda Shingirai Mushate and Grace Nyahangare.
