Sometimes the colours speak like a song, they speak together and it’s as if I am adding a melody with each brushstroke. Some people see it as spiritual but, to me, it’s about creating harmony with the colours, much like in music. I paint what is in my heart and what my heart tells me. I also paint what my brain tells me because I know it comes from deep down in the ancestral pools. When heart and mind agree, I know my spirit is in the right place. I paint to honour my ancestors! — Esther Mahlangu In Conversation: Thomas Girst, Azu Nwagbogu and Hans Ulrich Obrist, with Esther Mahlangu.]
Ndebele painting was made for walls. It was painted by women, on their own homes, and renewed every year; a practice that announced a marriage, a birth, a son leaving for initiation. A well-painted house spoke for the household. It was never made to leave the homestead.
Dr Esther Mahlangu took it off the wall. She was the first to carry Ndebele design onto canvas, and from there onto steel, architecture and design — to Paris in 1989, onto a BMW in 1991, into the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Her reason was practical: most people would never travel to Mpumalanga to see it, so it would have to travel to them.
Ndebele geometry is recognised on sight almost anywhere in the world now, and that is largely her doing. She did not invent the language — she inherited it, the way her mother and her grandmother had before her. What is hers is the move she made with it.
That is her mark.
This exhibition marks her ninety-first birthday by returning to it. Works on canvas and on form, alongside photographs of the homestead where it began and the journey between the two.
It is also why the exhibition closes on authentication. A legacy is only as secure as its record. Every work released through The Melrose Gallery, Dr Mahlangu’s official global representative, carries a numbered hologram, matched to a second on the reverse of the work, and an entry in her digital archive: the beginning of a catalogue raisonné. Her mark, and the record that keeps it attributable to her.
The Melrose Gallery · Official Global Representative
