Motswana artist sells P 8.4 million painting
Mompati Tlhankane | Sunday October 10, 2021 06:00
Due to travel restrictions, fewer collectors from the United States and Asia made the journey to Europe, but that didn’t stop the world’s top galleries from making major sales. There were more than a few paintings at Art Basel Unlimited that were so large that they required their own rooms, but none felt as epic proportioned both in size and content as Meleko Mokgosi’s Bread, butter and Power. Spread over 21 panels, it was immersive and filled almost all four walls of its dedicated booth.
The Cathedral Size is one of a series of eight chapters called “Democratic Intuition.” The works refer to important historical figures from Angela Davis to Harriet Tubman, and show scenes of both work and leisure that speak to gender divisions and the work done. Mokgosi’s monumental 21-panel installation Bread, Butter, and Power (2018) was co-presented by Gagosian gallery and New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery in the fair’s unlimited section. This panel shows two women, one sitting on the other’s lap, surrounded by various iconographies related to Black empowerment, including a picture of Angela Davis and a poster reading “They will never kill us all.”
Mokgosi is an artist and Associate Professor at the Yale School of Art. His large-scale, figurative, and often text-based works engage history painting and cinematic tropes to uncover notions of colonialism, democracy, and liberation across African history. His most recent body of work, Democratic Intuition (2013 - 2020) poses questions about ideas of the democratic in relation to the daily-lived experiences of the subjects that occupy southern Africa. Touching on the often-contradictory notions inherent in the concept and practice of democracy, the individual in the face of the collective, intuitive versus inscribed behaviors, Mokgosi probes the idiosyncratic ways in which democracy is reciprocated and unfolds across time.
Mokgosi received his BA from Williams College in 2007 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study program that same year. He then received his MFA from the Interdisciplinary Studio Program at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011. He participated in the Rauschenberg Residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, FL in 2015 and the Artist in Residence Program at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY in 2012. In 2018 he co-founded the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York City.