It would be easy to dub Anthony Wakaba Mutheki “South Africa’s Jean-Michel Basquiat”. The thumbnail version of Mutheki’s biography makes such a comparison too tempting to evade: young black artist with no formal training lives on streets of big city eking out existence on furthest fringes of society; said artist unbowed by adverse circumstances and continues to pour burning passion and towering talent into work; said work catches eye of influential art power-broker; striking originality of artist’s creations takes galleries by storm; he is overnight toast of the town with sell-out shows in the world’s artistic metropoles; sudden fame and adulation too heavy a shock to the system; dies dramatically of drug overdose at tragically young age.
With the exception of the drug overdose part — the young man I encounter is a highly focused and sober individual who eschews even coffee, and whose febrile imagination precludes the need for narcotics — this is more or less the essence of the Mutheki story. After two years spent living on the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town selling empty cooldrink cans and beer bottles to feed himself, Mutheki was eventually discovered by prominent art dealer Craig Mark. Thus ensued the vertiginous rise to the international art stratosphere with Mutheki’s works completely selling out at high-profile group exhibitions at the New York Art Expo, Philadelphia International Black Arts Festival, The Brooklyn Academy of Music and The Antiquarius Gallery in New York.
Back in South Africa, Mutheki is also causing a stir. He has been chosen as the featured artist at the Decorex Trade Show in Cape Town later in the year and, out of the 39 artists from around the world chosen for the fund-raising Mandela Unity Series (the fate of which lies suspended in arcane jurisprudential limbo), it was Mutheki’s works that were instantly snapped up. This achievement bears testimony to the artist’s rapid ascendant profile: a limited edition of 87 sets of five prints in which Mutheki interprets Nelson Mandela’s famous hand drawings went under the hammer, with the first set going for £3 500 and the last, owing to clamorous demand, selling for £11 500. When the brouhaha over ownership of the Mandela brand erupted, every buyer was offered the option of having their deposit returned. Every single one refused.
Because of the pace at which Mutheki’s star has risen, he has not yet found the time to present the kind of oeuvre-spanning landmark solo exhibition that firmly entrenches one as a viable contender for a place in the South African contemporary art pantheon. Until now, that is. This week saw the opening of Into the Light, Mutheki’s first one-man show that captures the remarkable depth, range and versatility of his work.
Almost 100 pieces, extending from tiny abstracts to epic landscapes, easily cover the vast expanses of Durban’s new Kizo Gallery, the majestically minimal 700m2 art space inside Gateway, the largest shopping complex in the southern hemisphere. It is testament to Mutheki’s stature and the booming contemporary art market in KwaZulu-Natal that several of his paintings, including a few big-ticket numbers, were bought even before they could be hung on the walls. Kizo opened with a bang in December last year with a solo exhibition by pop art sensation Richard Scott who, during the exhibition’s month-long run, sold more than 70% of his work, a pretty formidable statistic for any gallery.
Both Kizo co-owner Craig Mark and Mutheki sensed the untapped growth potential of the art market in KwaZulu-Natal, and made permanent moves from Jo’burg to Durban last year.
Mutheki is highly enamoured of his adoptive hometown and is already actively involved in the city’s creative community endeavours. He harbours a great love of Zulu culture and, incongruously, punk rock, two resources Durban has in great abundance. Shortly after moving to the city, Mutheki discovered the loose gathering of musicians, emcees and assorted cultural outcasts that hang around the inner city/Albert Park area. He quickly made friends with underground Durban ska-punk legends Sibling Rivalry and soon a loose collective was born. Mutheki puts up the funds and Sibling Rivalry provide the use of their rudimentary studio and their production skills to record and release the work of a growing stable of Durban’s unsung artists, from rappers and hip-hop crews to punk bands, poets and maskanda musicians. The initiative, called the Dyrych Project, is currently seeking funding from eThekwini municipality.
For Mutheki, who arrived in South Africa from Kenya in 1998, the project is a simple case of reciprocation. “Having received the love and support that I have in South Africa, I feel it’s my turn to give back to the community,” he says. Born of mixed Kikuyu and Masai heritage in Nairobi in 1973, Mutheki first caught the art world’s attention in 1993, when he moved to the sprawling slums of Nairobi to run creative skills workshops with the city’s destitute streetkids.
One such project yielded work of such a startlingly original nature that it caught the attention of human-rights workers, who arranged for an exhibition — called Nairobi Ghetto — in the United States. This is where the work of Mutheki and his charges first saw the inside of an art gallery. A few years later, Mutheki had become enchanted with the idea of post-liberation South Africa, and he felt compelled to see for himself “this new nation born into Africa, born into the world”.
Yet, within a few months of arriving in the country, he found himself destitute and homeless. I politely enquire as to how this state of affairs came about. “Well, having all these freedoms you have in South Africa — especially on the entertainment side — that we don’t have in Kenya, I overspent my funds. Suddenly, I ended up on the streets, where I stayed for almost two years.”
When asked what kind of “entertainment” had been his undoing, Mutheki clams up and refuses to divulge the juicy details. For a man who has absolutely no appetite for drink or drugs, it’s anyone’s guess what manner of vice chewed up his resources.
Nevertheless, the cloud bore a silver lining, for it was this rude awakening dealt to a young man born into a middle-class Kenyan family that Mutheki says “taught me to treasure life and inspired in me the desire to recreate this love of life through the medium of art”.
Though that may sound like the pay-off line for a sugary triumph-of-human-spirit-over-adversity film, it is nothing less than the truth. After scraping together enough money to buy some paint, Mutheki would dash off as many paintings as he could. He sold these for R20 or R50 at flea markets. Some time later, he could afford a small room in a hostel, where he was able to concentrate more on his work.
Word of his talent spread and soon there was a steady trickle of adventurous art hunters arriving at his garret to snap up his works. When Mark, then owner of an auction house in Jo’burg, first encountered Mutheki’s work, he was instantly smitten. Then and there he became his agent and manager and set about forging his charge’s inexorable path to success.
Now Mark and Mutheki sit comfortably in the well-appointed expanses of Kizo, surrounded by Mutheki’s remarkable repertoire of work that is in the process of being hung for the exhibition’s opening.
Despite the fact that I consider myself a worldly veteran of art exhibitions, I am gobsmacked by what my eyes encounter and, though much is made of Mutheki’s “lack of formal training”, this in itself hardly hardens the critical dick. For history is replete with autodidactic geniuses who have scoffed at the Socratic method and nevertheless created works of brilliance.
But there is something simultaneously direct and ineffable about Mutheki’s work that has my mind writhing in ecstasy. The contradictions are tectonic: every variegated vein is a jet of uncharted blood type. The stylistic versatility is so double-jointed that the paintings clip their toenails with their own teeth.
I see jigsaw canvases pock-marked with razors of acrylic and sack, serene twilit seascapes all sunset and silhouette, cubist nightmares of township chaos, splatter Zen metal fish, subatomically, super-humanly accurate portraiture, explosions of abstract expressionism, reductive symbolic experimental dementia, palimpsest after broken palimpsest …
In short, I am confronted by nothing less than a lasso around the neck of a nature that is both creator of the storm and occupant of its eye. The work of Mutheki will either suck you right in or spit you right out. Which you prefer is entirely up to you.
Anthony Mutheki’s first solo exhibition, Into The Light, is on show at Kizo Gallery, Gateway, until March 1.