ernest mancoba | exhibitions | gold of africa museum

Press release Gold of Africa Museum

In the Name of All Humanity
The African Spiritual Expression of Ernest Mancoba

Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) has been described as ‘not only one of the greatest painters and sculptors from South Africa but also one of the most outstanding of the 20th century’, yet he remains largely unknown to the South African public. His legacy will be on exhibition for the first time since his death in 2002, at the Gold of Africa Museum from 27 June to 30 September 2006.

In the Name of All Humanity is curated by Bridget Thompson who directed the film, Ernest Mancoba at Home, and is a project of the Art and Ubuntu Trust formed to develop understanding of Mancoba’s work in South Africa. The exhibition will be augmented by an artist’s workshop and a seminar that will refresh perspectives of the great South African intellectuals of the 1930s who were Mancoba’s peers and generate a renewed engagement with his aesthetic and philosophy.

The exhibition and its associated activities are supported by; the National Department of Arts and Culture, the Royal Danish Embassy, the National Arts Council of South Africa, the CWCI Fund (an EU-SA partnership programme), the Gold of Africa Museum, the Cape Town City Council, Caltex Oil SA (Pty) Ltd, and the Grand West Heritage Foundation.

‘Art is not just to give pleasure to the eye and the senses,’ Mancoba once said, ‘but to give courage for the continuation of our community.’ He compared the artist to a shaman or prophetic poet whose duty it is to raise his voice to speak the unspeakable.

It was his inability to do this in a racially divided society that prompted his departure from South Africa in 1938. Fifty-eight years later in a speech in Johannesburg, he said of his decision to leave, ‘I wished to participate in the great universal debate where Africa, though present by its ancient sculptural masterpieces in the possession of collectors and museums and in the opinions of so many European thinkers and artists, had nobody to speak for it and remained mute even in the elements of dialogue that concerned directly its own civilisation and culture.’

Mancoba’s mother had been both Christian and a traditional African and he was born with these spiritualities, one in each hand, as he put it. His quest as an artist was the exploration of a common humanity he had discovered in the reconciliation of these two value systems. He spent much of his life fulfilling this passion, mostly in Denmark and France, expressing his deeply humanistic sense of art through a gradual shift from sculpture to painting, drawing and printmaking.

Not long after leaving South Africa he was imprisoned in an internment camp in occupied France where he spent four years and married Danish sculptor, Sonja Ferlov. In 1948 he helped form the radically modernist Cobra group, which existed for just three years but had a great effect on painting in the second half of the 20th century.

Mancoba visited South Africa on several occasions after the first democratic elections in 1994. His work was celebrated with two retrospective exhibitions, curated by his biographer, Dr Elza Miles, at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the National Gallery in Cape Town. He was also granted honorary doctorates from his alma mater, the University of Fort Hare, and the University of the Western Cape.

Yet he remains relatively unknown in South Africa despite the pertinent message of his art which is this, ‘Above all,’ the artist said in 1996, ‘I wish to thank the South African people as a whole for the kindness and enthusiasm I have met in all circles of society and wherever I have been in this our beautiful country, today wholly reborn in the painfully gained knowledge that man is not primarily a Chinese, a Negro, a European or a Red Indian. Man is man by and through other men. In Africa, as in ancient Greece, you are only a man when you, like Homer’s hero Achilles in the Iliad, are able to conquer yourself, and at last see in the enemy; himself, yourself, and in his old white-haired father, your own.’

In the course of Mancoba’s life he was exposed to people and ancient art from many cultures; each encounter nurturing and informing his aesthetic and philosophical concerns. The exhibition at the Gold of Africa Museum concerns not only Mancoba’s work but examples of art from Africa and around the world that have thematic importance to his extraordinary life’s journey; whether Chinese, Native American, Inuit, Egyptian or European. It also includes for the first time in juxtaposition with his work, a selection of southern African beadwork which has resonance with his colour strategies and narrative method.

Mancoba’s artworks, oils, lithographs and sculptures are augmented by selected pieces from Danish collections with the support of the Royal Danish Embassy. Many of the ancient works have been sourced from Iziko museums in Cape Town and some from Museum Africa in Johannesburg.

The exhibition is in keeping with the purpose of the Gold of Africa Museum’s collection of extraordinary West African gold artefacts; which is to preserve the art of African goldsmithing while inspiring contemporary design. The museum’s ongoing temporary exhibitions from countries as diverse as India, Brazil, Mali and Egypt explore the commonality of this theme across geographical borders and cultural divides. The museum’s historic and intimate rooms also lend themselves to a close reading of the detail of the works on display.

MEDIA LIAISON:
Tracy Gilpin
media@goldofafrica.com
+27 21 405 1540 (t)
+27 82 684 9898 (c)

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