Balekane Legoabe: A Comprehensive Art Historical Study

Balekane Legoabe (born 1995) is a prominent South African visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans digital and traditional media, including digital collage, print, painting, ink drawing, and mixed media. She is also an illustrator, motion designer, curator, and arts educator based in Johannesburg, South Africa, whose work engages deeply with emotional experience, identity, and the natural world. Legoabe earned a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Communication with a specialisation in illustration and a Bachelor of Arts in Film Arts specialising in motion and stop‑motion design from the Open Window Institute between 2014 and 2018. Her academic grounding in both visual communication and film arts informs her fluid use of layered imagery and narrative structures in her work. 

Legoabe’s artistic formation began at The National School of the Arts, where she matriculated in 2013, specialising in visual arts, laying the groundwork for her later explorations in both digital and tactile techniques. Her early immersion in formal arts education coincided with South Africa’s expanding contemporary art scene, situating her as part of a younger cohort of artists pushing the boundaries of narrative and form. 

Medium and Technique
Legoabe operates across an impressive range of media, blending digital and analog processes to achieve works that are visually textured and conceptually rich. Her digital collages often involve layering organic shapes, human figures, and natural motifs using software tools such as Adobe Photoshop, where varying degrees of opacity, overlap, and blending modes underscore her thematic concerns with liminality and transitional states. 

Her recent print work, including series such as Diagrams of the Beginning, was created during a residency at 50ty/50ty fine art print studio in Cape Town, reflecting a dialogue between ancient artistic traditions such as San rock art and contemporary visual language. These prints were produced through traditional screen‑printing methods using multiple exposures to build depth and resonance. A portion of the proceeds from this series supported environmental conservation efforts, demonstrating Legoabe’s commitment to social and ecological engagement through art. 

In addition to digital and print, Legoabe’s mixed media works incorporate watercolour, graphite, ink, pastel, and acrylic on surfaces such as canvas and Fabriano paper. Notable works such as Party (2024) and Small Girl (2025) showcase her adept manipulation of materials to elicit both emotional and formal complexity within uniquely sized compositions. 

Conceptual Framework and Thematic Concerns
A central theme in Legoabe’s oeuvre is liminality, the exploration of emotional, psychological, and existential borderlands where states of being overlap and coexist. She has articulated her interest in how humans occupy multiple emotional states simultaneously, and how visual layering can reflect this complexity. Organic forms such as plants, animals, human figures, and elemental motifs recur in her work as living symbols that anchor abstract emotional states in recognisable forms. 

Her engagement with ancient rock art, mythology, and ritual reflects a broader interest in collective memory and cultural history. By drawing on symbolic traditions such as San rock paintings and fusing them with contemporary aesthetics, Legoabe creates imagery that bridges prehistoric visual languages with present‑day existential questions. This interplay between the historical and the present underscores a key conceptual thrust in her practice: the continuity of human meaning‑making across time. 

Exhibitions and Public Recognition
Legoabe’s work has been exhibited widely within South Africa and internationally, situating her as a significant voice in contemporary African art. She was the recipient of the prestigious StateoftheART Gallery Award in 2019, an accolade that supported her emerging practice and led to a solo exhibition What It Feels Like to Be in Water in 2020. Her participation in major art fairs such as the Turbine Art Fair and FNB Joburg Art Fair in 2019 helped bring her work to national attention. 

Group exhibitions have included Abstractd* at StateoftheART Gallery in Cape Town, where she exhibited alongside contemporaries exploring abstraction and form in visual dialogues. More recently, Legoabe’s work featured in the Evidence of Things Not Seen exhibition at EBONY/CURATED in Cape Town, foregrounding speculative practices in contemporary art and positioning her work within critical conversations about identity, imagination, and the unseen. 

Her participation in UB Art Gallery’s Liewe Land! III (University of Johannesburg) brought her into conversation with more than thirty contemporary artists reinterpreting landscape and place in South African art. These varied exhibition contexts demonstrate Legoabe’s versatility and her ability to contribute meaningfully to group curatorial themes that traverse abstraction, narrative, and cultural commentary. 

Collections and Market Presence
Legoabe’s work has been acquired by significant public collections, including the William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberley, South Africa, and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany, marking recognition of her artistic merit beyond national borders. 

At auction, works such as Trying to Touch the Sun (2025) have achieved notable results, with prices such as ZAR 55,000 demonstrating collector interest and market viability. This sale, conducted through Strauss & Co, also illustrates her engagement with charity and arts funding events. 

Artistic Impact and Critical Reception
Critics and curators frequently note the emotional resonance and visual depth of Legoabe’s work. Her ability to evoke complex emotional states through layered imagery and organic motifs positions her within a lineage of artists who address introspection and collective memory with nuance. The interplay between technique and theme in her practice has been seen as emblematic of contemporary South African art’s engagement with both local narratives and universal human experience. 

Her work’s inclusion on platforms such as Artsy further amplifies her international presence, with detailed catalogue entries highlighting her exploration of nature, identity, cycles of life, and resilience as key interpretive anchors for her visual language. 

Legoabe’s studio practice, as reported in features such as a StateoftheART studio visit, reveals an artist deeply reflective about process as well as outcome. She often speaks about balancing digital and traditional techniques, and how each medium informs the other in pursuit of expressive clarity. Quotes from that feature reveal her focus on continual experimentation and growth, a hallmark of her evolving artistic identity. 

Conclusion: The Artistic Legacy of Balekane Legoabe
Balekane Legoabe’s work stands as a testament to the power of layered visual storytelling, blending technical innovation with profound thematic inquiry. Her art speaks to the dualities of human experience, the dialogue between past and present, and the ongoing conversation between individuals and their environments. Across exhibitions, collections, collaborative projects, and print collaborations tied to social causes, Legoabe continues to expand both her artistic reach and her engagement with pressing cultural narratives. Her practice affirms the importance of art that is both visually compelling and conceptually grounded in emotional and historical awareness.