Paul Sekete: Between Township Memory, African Modernism and the Language of the Unspoken
Paul Sekete occupies an unusual and increasingly important place in South African art history. Born in Ficksburg in the Free State in 1957 and dying in 2010, he belonged to a generation of Black South African artists whose careers developed across the final decades of apartheid and the first years of democracy. Yet Sekete does not fit comfortably into the conventional categories used to describe South African art of that period. He was not simply a township artist, a political artist, a traditionalist, a modernist or a sculptor. His work moved between these categories, creating a visual language in which ordinary people, memory, ritual, landscape and mythology became deliberately difficult to separate. Today, his work is held in significant institutional and private collections, including the Constitutional Court Art Collection, the University of Cape Town, the University of Fort Hare, Oliewenhuis Art Museum, the South African Department of Public Works and Ellerman House. His wo...
