Artists

Cinga Samson, born in 1986, is a South African artist from Cape Town who primarily works in oil paint. The rendering of his anonymous subjects – in muted tones with white, pupil-less eyes and shaven heads – is a marriage of the contemporary with the long tradition of figurative painting. His works reference his own identity and the complexity of the South African experience through symbolic, spiritual, and socio-cultural contexts. In 2006, Samson, a self-taught artist, began to paint after he joined Isibane Creative Arts – an artist collective in Khayelitsha, a township on the outskirts of Cape Town. He is now represented by White Cube.

Samson received the Tollman award for Visual Arts in 2017. He has exhibited in group and solo shows locally and globally – including Cape Town; Berlin, Germany; Cologne, Germany; New York City, NY, USA; Minneapolis, MN, USA; and Oaxaca, Mexico. He currently lives and works in Cape Town.