Sfiso Ka-Mkame
Sfiso Ka-Mkame is largely self-taught but his career was promoted by participation in Community Arts Workshops, Abangani Open School and the Thupelo workshops started by David Koloane and Bill Ainslie in Johannesburg in the mid-1980s. Ka-Mkame speaks of them as ‘milestones’ that took his work to another level. His ‘love letters’ of the 1980s were created at the height of the turbulence of the apartheid era in South Africa; the strength of these works gave Ka-Mkame a high profile in South African art. Beyond the struggle and protest themes, he still finds interest in day-to-day struggles that continue to nourish his surfaces. The bold layering of oil pastel colours provides textures of varying depths and sets the tone for the issues that are to be addressed. Comments on social ills and matters of the ancestral spirit world occupy the artist’s mind and with these he delivers work that is at once captivating and engaging. Read More…
