Notes

‘Over a career spanning five decades, Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi has articulated an independent vision of the world that celebrates black culture, and engages in a complex animistic spiritually. Her work offers us the opportunity to enrich our own lives by appreciating both one another and the natural world in a more meaningful way, more important now than ever before. Yet her formal technique, not only her content, is ground-breaking, fusing the spiritual and the visual in innovative and compelling ways, inviting us to return again and again to her work.’¹

She has a very ‘distinct style using vibrant and juxtaposed colour, rough surfaces, distorted perspectives, abstracted human and animal figures, and dream images – often in a pointillist, stippled style.’²

In Horse Spirit Sebidi profoundly melds the traditional and her rural roots from the perspective of urban city life as the presence of the horse is seen and felt behind the doubled-headed figures alluding to both the spiritual and the physical, as well as the hardship and anguish of her fellow human beings.

1. Elana Brundyn and Owen Martin (2018) ‘Foreword’ in Robin Kirsten (ed.) Batlhaping Ba Re!: Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi, exhibition catalogue, Cape Town: Everard Read Circa and Norval Foundation, page 7.

2. Source: Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi, Biography, available at https://www.everard-read-capetown.co.za/artist/MMAKGABO%20HELEN_SEBIDI/biography/

Exhibited

Norval Foundation, Cape Town, Batlhaping Ba Re!: Mmakgabo Mmapula Helen Sebidi, 1 September 2018 to 24 January 2019.