Kamva Matuis: Painting the Afterlife of History
Kamva Matuis is moving quickly. The Johannesburg-based painter has gone from graduating at the University of the Witwatersrand to solo exhibitions, group presentations and major art-fair exposure in a short period. But speed is not the most important thing about his emergence. What makes Matuis worth watching is the seriousness with which he approaches history, political memory, death and the body. He is still young enough to be described as part of Gen Z, yet his paintings rarely feel youthful in the conventional sense. They do not chase the speed of social media imagery or the visual language of easy spectacle. Instead, Matuis works slowly through the traditions of figurative painting, using bodies and historical photographs as starting points for questions that remain unresolved. His paintings often feel like scenes remembered imperfectly: recognizable but psychologically unsettled, intimate but politically charged. He paints people who carry histories larger than themselves, from a...
