AKAA | 14 - 20 October 2024

Lulama Wolf

"There is no escaping in this body of work how colour is used to evoke placement for the audience. Mlambo, notes, “where colour is concerned, I have stuck to the same rhythm. I used to isolate colour and not necessarily bring it together, now the blending of colours is starting to be something of interest to me...”. Adding, “When you look closely at how I create the gradients, there’s a surety I have about that and now I have realized... I’ve learned how to solve certain colour problems and how to apply colour in different ways. Growth especially in how I apply paint and create texture”.

The emotion and story being told are in the background using colour to bring about the depth of joy seen and experienced through the work. Mlambo, process adds a layer of complication as the pigment develops and ages overtime with the artwork. The natural, earthy tones gives a sense of home in music and art...."

- Asanda Sango Madosi

Lulama Wolf

Lulama Wolf (b. 1993) is a visual artist who lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

At the intersection of Neo-Expressionism and Modern African Art, Lulama Wolf interrogates the pre-colonial African experience through the contemporary mind by using smearing, scraping, and deep pigment techniques that were used in vernacular architecture, and the patterns created largely by women to decorate traditional African homes.

“My work carries my spirit, before it carries a message. My intuition plays a vital role in the direction I go and then I compartmentalise with what I prioritise. I represent different parts of myself including abstraction, curiosity, mythology, spirituality and introspection. Blackness is vital in my work because it is created by a black woman despite the medium or language it speaks, it is vital because proof of existence is rare in the black community, information is shared but isn’t sustained in ways that are knowledgeable to us right now. I express my yearning for answers and clarity in ways that make my blackness clear even when the work is abstract. My practice embodies subtlety in a form of texture and expression, a curious mix of ambiguity and curiosity. I experiment with different textures and mold that are formed from the earth.”

At only 31 years of age, Wolf’s work is featured in collections around the world. She was the finalist of the The Emergence Art Prize (2020), and a featured artist at ArtXLagos 2022, as part of their Artists Across Borders Programme, and of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York in May 2023. Notable exhibitions include Reflect, Reimagine, Reset, THK Gallery, Cape Town (2020) 1-54 at Christies, Paris (2021), Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, FNB Art Joburg, Johannesburg (2021) The Right To Ease, The Breeder Gallery, Athens (2022) Ayakha: Indlela Yokuxola / Rebuilding: The Path to Forgiveness (2023) THK Gallery, Cape Town, and Common Efforts, Eighteen Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, (2023). Her work has caught the attention of not only collectors, but designers - she designed a range of homeware for H&M worldwide in 2023 and collaborated with Bang & Olufsen in 2024.

Gillian Rosselli

Gillian Rosselli (born 1962) is a Zimbabwean artist whose figurative and abstract practice reflects a range of contemporary everyday and socio-political issues, including domestic violence - particularly against women and children -, the legacy of colonization and the refugee migration crisis. She studied a Bachelor of Fine Art from 1981 - 1984 and has since developed her complex, distinctive language.

Rosselli’s work explores both personal and broader societal issues in Zimbabwe and beyond. In addition to her socio-political mission, she is an expert in using her universal artistic language as a tool to connect her work to the global contemporary agenda and their key themes of identity, gender / queerness and collective narratives / templates / memories. Rosselli is strongly commited to seeing and spiritual connections. She is embedding meaning through the layering of acrylic paint, sensitive use of color, and ambiguous contours. Rosselli has had six solo exhibitions to date. Her work is included in prestigious collections world-wide, public and private ones and has featured in several local and international exhibitions, including ‘Five Bhobh - Painting At the End of an Era’ at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town in 2018. She has won many awards throughout her career, including the overall award of distinction for painting in Zimbabwe in 1995.

Abdus Salaam

Abdus Salaam (b. 1989) is a visual artist who lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

Salaam is a self-taught multi-disciplinary artist inspired by natural beauty, ecology and spirituality. Salaam reveals a sensitivity to three- dimensional spatial expression and the metaphysical connotations inherent in nature, materials, forms and colours. Contemporary in his mystic abstraction, his work is rooted in poetry, calling from a familiar place to a state of peaceful and intensive longing, using materials to explore the immaterial and always working alone to imbue his intention into his work. Moving freely between mediums – from sculpture to painting, video, photographic ‘light paintings’, poetry, augmented reality, and music – he creates poetic worlds, from the intimate to large-scale installation.

His work is a cultural fusion of Western, Eastern and African sensibilities, shaped by his international coming of age and rooted in the dramatic landscapes around Cape Town, where his earliest memories were shaped on a farm, spending time painting and sculpting with natural materials in the mountains of South Africa with his mother.

Salaam is represented in collections locally and abroad, including the Mohammed Afkhami and EKARD Collections. He held two sold out solo presentations in 2022, both at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and Abu Dhabi Art. In 2023 Salaam was a finalist in the Art Figura Prize, culminating in an exhibition in Perla Castrum Museum in Schwartzenberg Castle, Germany. In 2023 he was selected as the artist in residence for the prestigious Institute of Public Architecture’s Blockhouse Residency on Governor’s Island, New York. In November 2023, he presented a second sold out presentation at Abu Dhabi Art.

In 2024, Salaam completed a residency at the prestigious Nirox Foundation, followed by a critically acclaimed exhibition. In June 2024, he completed the Giorgio Angeli Residency in Pietrasanta, Italy.

AKAA : Booth A7 | Le Carreau du Temple, Paris

Gillian Rosselli

Lulama Wolf

Lulama Wolf

Lulama Wolf

Abdus Salaam

Lulama Wolf

Gillian Rosselli

Abdus Salaam

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