Ernest Mancoba
In a 2002 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mancoba spoke of himself as an ‘invisible man’; his life lived in exile reflected in his exclusion from both European and South African art histories. An artist passed over, he appears as only a footnote in many accounts of modernism (if indeed he appears at all). Mancoba, in his preoccupation with universalism, never made the work expected of him as a black South African at a time when romantic scenes of township life and rural landscapes were de rigueur. Instead, his work remained implacable in its pursuits. Such is Sculpture, which looks Janus-like in two directions at once, to European minimalism and West African figuration.
b.1904, Turffontein; d.2002, Clamart
In death, Ernest Mancoba has found more critical attention and acknowledgement than he did in life. He has been granted, in absentia, such significant titles as "the first South African modernist" and "the first black modernist". In 1938, Mancoba left segregated South Africa to live in France, where he met his wife, the Danish artist Sonja Ferlov, and joined the avant-garde CoBrA collective. His preoccupations, however, never entirely aligned with those of his European counterparts. Throughout his career, Mancoba resisted category: his paintings and drawings were never entirely abstract nor entirely figurative, were at times minimalist and spare, at others dense and overworked. To his detractors, the artist’s work was neither Western enough nor African enough. Such dichotomies, however, were of little interest to Mancoba, who pursued a more utopian expression of art. The ideal would be, he wrote, “not to please the eye or the senses but to use art as a means, as a language to express feelings and ideas in relation to the present, the future and the past, to discover new concepts by which to regard the world for the salvation of man.”