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 anti-apartheid figures to musicians and ordinary bodies caught in states of vulnerability. The result is a practice concerned less with illustrating history than with asking what history does to the people who inherit it.

A painter shaped by place

Matuis was born in Burgersdorp in South Africa's Eastern Cape and later moved to Johannesburg, where he studied at Wits University. That movement between places informs the way he thinks about identity and memory.

His early career developed through a combination of formal education and opportunities in Johannesburg's independent and commercial art scenes. In 2025, he presented a solo exhibition at Lemkus Gallery, the Johannesburg space founded by Jared Leite. The gallery has become an important platform for younger South African artists, making Matuis's presentation significant not simply as an individual milestone but as part of a broader emerging generation.

One of the paintings that drew particular attention showed two Fallists preparing to cover the statue of Cecil John Rhodes during the Rhodes Must Fall protests. Matuis painted the scene from an unusual low vantage point, looking upward at the protesters and the monument.

The composition matters because the Rhodes Must Fall movement is already saturated with familiar photographic images. Matuis avoids simply reproducing one of those iconic photographs. Instead, he changes the perspective, forcing the viewer to occupy a different position in relation to the protesters and the statue.

He has described the painting as a form of exorcism.

That word offers a useful way into his practice. Exorcism suggests an attempt to remove something that remains present: a memory, an inheritance, a violence or an unresolved historical burden. Matuis does not paint the past because it has disappeared. He paints because it has not.

Painting history without making history comfortable

The Rhodes Must Fall painting sits within a larger concern with South Africa's political memory. Matuis belongs to a generation that did not experience apartheid as an adult but grew up inside its consequences.

That distinction matters. His work does not operate as conventional historical painting. He is not reconstructing the past from a position of distance. He is dealing with images, stories and symbols that remain active in contemporary South African life.

The Rhodes statue is a particularly powerful example. It represents colonial power, but it also became the object around which a new generation articulated demands about institutional transformation, education and memory. By focusing on the Fallists rather than simply on Rhodes, Matuis shifts the emphasis from the monument to the act of confronting it.

His painting therefore captures a moment of resistance while also suggesting something more psychological. The protesters are not merely removing an object. They are attempting to alter the physical environment in which history is remembered.

This interest in the relationship between the body and historical power recurs throughout Matuis's work.

The body as evidence

Matuis is fundamentally a figurative painter. His figures are often presented with enough realism to establish a sense of physical presence, but he uses that realism selectively.

The body can become a historical document.

At the 2026 Cape Town Art Fair, Lemkus Gallery presented a particularly disturbing example: a stitched-up cadaver with a half-eaten apple balanced on its torso. The image brings together death, vulnerability and symbolism without offering an obvious narrative.

The apple introduces an immediate association with temptation, knowledge and biblical mythology. The stitched body suggests medical intervention, violence or an attempt to repair what cannot easily be repaired. Put together, the elements create an image that resists a single reading.

This is one of Matuis's strengths. He trusts ambiguity.

A less assured painter might explain the subject through excessive symbolism. Matuis leaves enough uncertainty for the viewer to participate in constructing meaning.

His paintings can be unsettling precisely because they do not tell us how to feel.

The colour of memory

Color plays an unusually important role in Matuis's paintings. He has a particular command of brown, a color that painters often struggle to use without making an image muddy or visually flat.

In his work, brown becomes expansive rather than restrictive. It can describe skin, walls, clothing, soil, shadow and atmosphere within the same composition. Instead of separating figures cleanly from their environments, Matuis often allows them to emerge from a shared tonal field.

This has a psychological effect.

His restrained palettes slow the eye. They remove some of the visual noise associated with contemporary image culture and direct attention back to gesture, expression and physical form.

The choice also has implications for how Black bodies are represented. Brown is not simply a neutral descriptive color in Matuis's paintings. It becomes part of the atmosphere surrounding his figures, allowing skin to occupy the center of the image without being reduced to a flat signifier of race.

This sensitivity to brown is especially important in figurative painting because skin is rarely one color. Matuis exploits its range: ochres, rusts, deep reds, umbers and muted earth tones can coexist within a single figure.

The result is painterly rather than photographic. He uses realism as a foundation, not a destination.

Cape Town as a trigger

Matuis's first visit to Cape Town became the starting point for a series of paintings presented through Everard Read's Cubicle Series in January 2026.

The series demonstrates another aspect of his practice: his paintings often begin with encounters rather than predetermined themes. A new environment can produce a visual or psychological response that later becomes a painting.

This is important because it prevents his work from becoming too dependent on political symbolism. Although history is a major concern, Matuis also paints from observation and personal experience.

The Cape Town paintings allowed him to explore the city through his own first impressions. The works are not simply travel paintings. They are responses to the difference between encountering a place physically and knowing it through photographs, stories and cultural associations.

That tension between direct experience and inherited imagery runs throughout his practice.

Winnie Mandela and Nina Simone

At the 2026 Cape Town Art Fair, Blank Projects presented portraits by Matuis of Winnie Mandela and Nina Simone.

The pairing is revealing.

Both women became cultural symbols far beyond their individual lives. Winnie Mandela remains inseparable from the history of apartheid, resistance and the complicated politics of liberation. Nina Simone combined music with a powerful commitment to Black political and social freedom in the United States.

Matuis has identified both as role models.

By painting them, he is not simply making portraits of famous women. He is considering how individuals become symbols and what happens when a person becomes inseparable from the history they represent.

Portraiture gives him a way to negotiate that problem. A symbol is public; a face is personal.

Matuis brings the two together.

His portraits retain the recognizable identities of his subjects, but they also carry the weight of the cultural histories attached to them. This allows him to explore admiration without turning the subjects into untouchable icons.

Between influence and invention

Matuis works within a long tradition of figurative painting, but his sources are not confined to painting.

Photography is clearly important to his practice. Historical photographs, press images and portraits provide starting points that he transforms through composition, color and painterly interpretation.

This process raises a question central to contemporary figurative painting: what does it mean to paint an image that already exists?

For Matuis, the answer appears to lie in translation.

He does not compete with the camera's ability to record detail. Instead, he changes the emotional conditions of the image. A different viewpoint, a restricted palette, or an altered relationship between figures can shift what the original photograph means.

The painting becomes a second reading.

That is why his work feels connected to memory. Memory does not reproduce an event perfectly. It selects, compresses and rearranges. Matuis's paintings operate in a similar space.

Why Matuis matters now

The South African art scene has no shortage of technically accomplished young painters. Figurative painting has experienced renewed attention internationally, and many artists have found audiences through highly polished representations of contemporary life.

Matuis stands out because he brings something less easily marketable into that tradition: uncertainty.

His paintings do not always resolve their subjects. They create situations that viewers have to sit with. Death remains death. Political history remains unresolved. Role models remain complicated. A familiar city becomes unfamiliar when seen through someone else's first encounter.

That complexity makes his work more durable than the immediate excitement surrounding his rapid career development.

The momentum is real. His Lemkus solo exhibition, Everard Read's Cubicle Series, and the simultaneous presence of Lemkus and Blank Projects at Cape Town Art Fair all point to an artist entering the professional gallery system with unusual confidence.

But the more important development is happening inside the paintings.

Matuis is building a visual language around the body, memory and historical inheritance. He paints figures because bodies hold evidence. He paints historical subjects because the past continues to shape the present. He uses restrained color because understatement can carry more force than spectacle.

His work also demonstrates why young artists should not be judged only by how quickly they enter the market. Matuis's real achievement is the emergence of a recognizable point of view.

He is interested in what remains after the event: after the protest, after the death, after the journey, after the historical figure becomes an icon. His paintings occupy that aftermath.

That is where his practice becomes compelling.

The shortcuts may have accelerated his arrival, but they cannot account for what happens next. Matuis now has to deepen the questions that brought him here. If he continues to resist easy answers and pushes further into the tension between history and imagination, he could develop into one of the more significant figurative painters of his generation.

The promise is not simply that he can paint.

It is that he has something he needs to paint.