The early years of Nicholas Hlobo’s career coincided with the end of apartheid in the artist’s native South Africa. The optimism and liberatory sentiment of this period is reflected in much of Hlobo’s body of work, where metaphorically resonant materials such as ribbon, leather, thread, and rubber are melded and brought together in complex visual narratives which present evocative meditations on race, gender, and identity.
Hlobo was born in 1975 in Cape Town. He has held solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, Cape Town, and Tate Modern, London, and his work is held in collection at numerous institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate, London, and the South African National Gallery, Cape Town.
Work by Hlobo will be included in the upcoming large-scale exhibition The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican, London. Hlobo was selected as a protégé by mentor Anish Kapoor as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. He lives and works in Johannesburg.
