A balmy Tuesday night on Cape Town’s Kloof Street: against my better judgment I elbow my way into Asoka, a collars-and-heels sort of place that sometimes apes a jazz den, to see resident jazz quartet the Restless Natives.
The only standing space is between the bar and the bathroom; a seat would be out of the question. Then, from a row of bodies pressed together at sofa height shoots a hand, waving like mad. To my astonishment the wave is directed at me and the waver is Nandipha Mntambo. She is offering me a seat — on the lap of one of her companions, perhaps?
Mntambo and I had met only once before, for an interview at the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Woodstock. That was in June 2008, about four months before our encounter at Asoka. Her wave from the sofa took me by surprise, firstly, because I seldom experience such amicability in the fair Cape, and secondly, because it lacked the wariness and vanity art starlets often show the press.
Among South Africa’s young artists edging their way into the art world, 27-year-old Mntambo’s commercial and critical success is unprecedented. Since her graduation from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2007 she has been snapped up by Cape Town dealer Michael Stevenson, profiled in every art publication worth its ink and is the shiny new gem in a number of major corporate collections.
This year alone she has featured in eight international exhibitions, art festivals and biennales, besides her appearances on the local gallery circuit, and from each venture springs a new mob of curators and collectors eager to have her join their stables.
On the occasion of her solo exhibition, Umphatsi Wemphi, at Brodie/Stevenson in Johannesburg I interview her over the phone.
‘I was so nervous about this last night,” she confesses while en route to Seapoint, a carful of friends chattering in the background.
It’s unlikely that visitors to Umphatsi Wemphi would call the bristly minotaur in her photographs The Rape of Europa and Narcissus, or the horned and glaring bronze busts made after her own portrait, bashful.
In her newest works the anonymous cowhide ghosts that first captivated the art world meld with her own body. Photoshop has given her a hairy back and chest and a heavy pair of horns. In The Rape of Europa this biped beast hunches over a naked, fully human version of Mntambo playing the mythological princess Europa.
Oddly, these daring performances unnerve her less than having to perform fully clothed before a video camera. In her first video, Ukungenisa, she plays a matador rehearsing a bullfight in the derelict Praça de Touros arena in Maputo.
In her little black pumps, taking practised steps, she doesn’t quite look ready to take on a real bull.
‘With the video, to know that this moving image of myself will continuously be there, and to have to step into this character and sustain the performance, was very difficult for me,” she says. ‘I guess I’m a lot shyer than I expected I would be — In the photographic works and the sculptures it’s easier: I’m there, but I’m not.”
In addition to Ukungenisa, the first in a series of three video works, Mntambo debuts a collection of small ink drawings at Brodie/Stevenson, all of which sold out before the opening of the show.
‘You know, I didn’t ever really think I could draw, to be honest with you,” she says. ‘These drawings came out of a studio visit. One day David [Brodie] and Michael [Stevenson] were in my studio and I’d been doodling and had some storyboards up and they asked: ‘Why don’t you draw?’”
The further Mntambo seems to wander from her germinal cowhide moulds, the more curious her fans become about when she will tire of things bovine.
Her forecast: ‘I don’t know if I will — There’s so much going on for me with the animal and the material that I think it will be a long time before I’ve
managed to explore all there is to explore here.”
Nandipha Mntambo’s exhibition, Umphatsi Wemphi, runs at the Brodie/Stevenson Gallery, 373 Jan Smuts Avenue, for the duration of the Spring Art Tour, closing on October 10