Katlego Tlabela

Katlego Tlabela finds himself predominantly concerned in the multi-disciplinary technical and creative processes of painting, photography, and collage. Within each of these disciplines, he finds ways to incorporate elements of print-making. Tlabela’s artistic interests have spanned from social and political crises in Post-Apartheid South Africa, the independent African continent, as well as the United States of America. Resistance, protest, dialogues around race, and positive methods of representation of the Black body and experience are visualized through text-based and visual works often revisiting history and relating it back to contemporary events.

The political and personal merges through Tlabela’s work, whose current practice focuses primarily on painting and depicting fictional yet attainable scenes of the Black middle class. Throughout his career, Tlabela has achieved success and recognition locally and internationally through exhibitions, fairs, and placement of his work in public and private collections.

Katlego Tlabela studied at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art and is based in Pretoria. His work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, and the African Artists Foundation and at art fairs such as Art Basel, Frieze, Miart, and LISTE. It is part of the permanent collections of Fondation H in Madagascar and Sam Nhlengethwa’s Ditau Collection in Cape Town.