Percy Konqobe at The Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town

8/8/2019 Percy Konqobe at The Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town

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Percy Konqobe: Sculptor and Sangoma

Will be on exhibition at Everard Read Gallery, CT from Mid September-Mid October 2010

omkhubulwane , 75 x 36 x 30 cm


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Percy Konqobe: Sculptor and Sangoma

Will be on exhibition at Everard Read Gallery, CT from Mid September-Mid October

Percy Konqobe was born in Gauteng, 1939.

Konqobe, who lives in Soweto and practises as a full-time sangoma, draws his

inspiration, unsurprisingly, from dreams, visions, and "outside forces". His bronze,

mostly figurative sculptures are not large, but convey a monumental force through

straining planar shoulders and bodies, and faces that gaze skywards, seeming to

yearn for epiphany. There is, in these works, a sense of longing for a South Africa in

which miracles and mysticism were undiminished. By Brenda Atkinson


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Intimate Love, 57 x 27 x 27 cm


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This Image: Newspaper Boy, 36 x 15 x 25 cm


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Seated Woman, 38 x 27 x 32 cm


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Victory, 35 x 54 x 23 cm


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Mother and Child Chameleon, 31 x 50 x 22 cm


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wo Faces of man, 54 x 21 x 20 cm


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Feeding Time, 30 x 22 x 24 cm


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The Artist with his sculpture: Mother, The Pillar of Strength, 122 x 42 x 80 cm


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The Future, 75 x 22 x 29 cm


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Breastfeeding at the Park, 33 x 27 x 37 cm


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Mourning Woman, 44 x 23 x 32 cm


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Mother, The Pillar of Strength, 122 x 42 x 80 cm


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Everard Read, Cape Town and Rose Korber Art

in association with the dreyer foundation,

present an exhibition of Percy Konqobe bronzes (created from 1980

2009)

Percy Ndithembile Konqobe was born in 1939 in Nigel, South Africa. He was initiated as a

sangoma in the mid 1960s and has since practised in Soweto as a healer. He began giving

form to his dreams and visions in clay in the late 1980s, thanks to the urging of the sculptor

Sydney Kumalo. He is today a recognised sculptor, whose works are attracting growing

interest internationally.

Konqobe is a man of dreams. There are dreams that come by day and those that plague his

nights, demanding to be vividly remembered. The recurrence of these dreams does not

make them easy to capture in solid works of art. On the contrary, they demand to be

captured with linear clarity and tactile accuracy and, to make it more demanding, they must

breathe the spirits of the ancestors that commissioned them.

Konqobe is also a man in love with form, and has a great ability to capture these forms. The

lines of his sculptures are lyrical and tactile. His choice of medium is deliberate: clay is soil

and soil is the abode of the ancestors. To touch and shape it becomes an act of

communication with ancestral forces that guard and guide his creativity and destiny.

What then happens when he casts his artworks? Does he imprison the spirits of his

ancestors? Konqobe answers: The bronzes are evidence to the world of the visitations of

the ancestors messengers that draw attention to my gods.

His works are testaments to a force beyond him and beyond his time. It is clear that, in order

for those born outside Konqobes worldview to experience his works more profoundly, they

must enter into a pact with their minds to suspend disbelief. Yet even if one rejects this

suspension of disbelief, Konqobes works of art stand alone as masterpieces that speak an

eloquent language of sculpture.

- Professor Pitika P. Ntuli, with Jenny Gsell GmbH, Amy Klement & Caroline Gutberlet

This exhibition has been made possible by the Dreyer foundations vision in initiating the

retrospective & casting the works. The foundations aims are to promote international

awareness, tolerance in all areas of society and intercultural understanding, as well as

providing development aid. The foundation's goals are met by carrying out measures that

create the spiritual, mental, cultural and psychological basis for international understanding

and peace.

Documents

Percy Konqobe at The Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town