.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Kudzanai Chiurai is a multi-disciplinary artist working across painting, photography, drawing, film and installation. His practice reflects on the dynamics at play between history, contemporary culture, displacement, the psychological experience of urban spaces, and the Western imprint on Africa. Often overtly political, he entered a self-imposed exile from his native Zimbabwe after receiving arrest threats following his exhibition of two controversial artworks: Rau Rau and The Battle of Zimbabwe, which depicted Robert Mugabe as a demonic figure.
In Boy Next Door, the central figure appears self-consciously aspirational, sporting a blazer and tie as he poses in front of lines of commuter trains as well as the marketing-approved typeface of ‘Soweto’. The work speaks to ambition, modernity and affluence in an industrialised society, while implying that it might all be a utopian fantasy. In Johannesburg, Soweto is South Africa’s oldest township and famous for its resistance in the Soweto uprising during the apartheid era.
Kudzanai Chiurai lives and works in Johannesburg. In 2012, he was the recipient of the FNB Art Prize and was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2014. He has exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. Recent solo exhibitions include We Live in Silence, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), Stuttgart (2019) as well as Madness and Civilization, Södertälje Konsthall, Stockholm (2019). He is represented by Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town and London, and Marianne Ibrahim, Chicago.
In Boy Next Door, the central figure appears self-consciously aspirational, sporting a blazer and tie as he poses in front of lines of commuter trains as well as the marketing-approved typeface of ‘Soweto’. The work speaks to ambition, modernity and affluence in an industrialised society, while implying that it might all be a utopian fantasy. In Johannesburg, Soweto is South Africa’s oldest township and famous for its resistance in the Soweto uprising during the apartheid era.
Kudzanai Chiurai lives and works in Johannesburg. In 2012, he was the recipient of the FNB Art Prize and was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2014. He has exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, and Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town. Recent solo exhibitions include We Live in Silence, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA), Stuttgart (2019) as well as Madness and Civilization, Södertälje Konsthall, Stockholm (2019). He is represented by Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town and London, and Marianne Ibrahim, Chicago.