Description
We’re thrilled to present a new series of prints by Bonolo Kavula, the 2022 Norval Foundation Award winner, created in collaboration with Georgina Berens of Loft Editions. Represented by SMAC Gallery, Kavula’s work is defined by meticulous process, materiality, and repetition, spanning printmaking, drawing, and performance.
In this latest edition, she revisits her signature use of Shweshwe fabric, a material she often transforms by punching out circular patterns. However, in this work, she shifts her approach—hand-carving and printing the circular discs instead of removing them, resulting in a woodcut effect. This new version of her work speaks to her ongoing engagement with pattern, absence, and presence.
This series consists of four different prints, each in an edition of three.
Artist bio:
From her earliest works to the present, Bonolo Kavula’s art has existed between the intersections of painting, printmaking, drawing and installation, pushing the limitations of each. Using the simple unit of the circle and line, Kavula has created a unique visual language that engages with geometric shapes and forms to reimagine the language of 1960s post-minimalism and serial art. While formalist in nature, Kavula incorporates traditional shweshwe cloth into her practice, evoking cultural, ancestral, archival and historical connotations specific to her work. The process is that of excessive repetition, each dot with its own landscape of minutiae, telling of the meditative action of labour, and of the creation of new meaning through deconstruction and transformation.
Kavula obtained a BA(FA) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2014, majoring in Printmaking. Kavula received the 2014 Katrine Harries Print Cabinet Award at the University of Cape Town and she was a founding member of the Cape Town based artist collective, iQhiya. In 2022, Kavula presented her first solo museum exhibition titled Lewatle at the Norval Foundation, in Cape Town, South Africa, as well as a solo exhibition, Soft Landing, at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2021, she presented a solo booth at Art Basel Miami Beach, titled a re kopane ko thabeng, as well as her first solo exhibition, sewedi sewedi, at SMAC Gallery in Cape Town. Her works are included in the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) Collection in Miami, USA, and the Iziko South African National Gallery Collection in Cape Town, South Africa. This year, Kavula is set to commence an artist-in-residence programme at Fondation CAB, in Brussels, Belgium.
