David Koloane was born into a working-class family in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra, in Gauteng province, Union of South Africa, in 1938. The young Koloane had a natural talent for art, and his childhood under apartheid became a central theme in his work as an abstract expressionist.
Painter David Koloane was born into a working-class family in the Johannesburg township of Alexandra, in the Gauteng province of the Union of South Africa, in 1938. The young Koloane had a natural talent for art, but his childhood idyll was shattered, when the all-white government apartheid regime came to power in 1948. (African Union, 2026, np). Koloane witnessed the hardline brutality and victimisation suffered during the enforced expulsion from the ancestral homeland, when Black South Africans were forced into racially segregated townships, structurally underdeveloped and overcrowded by deportations. It is within this context of sustained hardship that the adolescent Koloane and his family lived: a period of uprisings, political resistance, and police intimidation. During this time Koloane attended secondary school, where he was able to paint and draw freely. However, in 1956, Koloane's father's long-term illness cut short his son's education and forced him to seek employment to support the household. Before leaving school, Koloane befriended Louis Maqhubela, a local artist living in Alexandra, who would become an important mentor, guide, and support in his artistic career. Between 1974 and 1977, Koloane attended art classes at the Bill Ainslie Studios, as well as art events, museums, and galleries, as he developed his art technique and activism. In 1977, with Zulu Bidi and Hugh Nolutshungu, Koloane founded The Gallery, which, it is suggested, was 'Johannesburg's first black-owned art gallery.' (O'Toole, frieze, np). In 1982, Koloane also headed the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) Arts Centre, where he later met two prominent and influential Englishmen: the sculptor Anthony Caro and the art connoisseur and philanthropist, Robert Loder, co-founders of the international organisation, Triangle Artists Workshop, which he attended on several occasions.
In 1984, Koloane arrived in England to pursue a Diploma in Museum Studies at the University of London. While in the capital, Koloane embarked on a series of highly successful exhibitions, showing at Stockwell Open Studios in 1984 and 1985, a beacon for radical artists whose creativity focused on art activism against the established, politically conservative order of Thatcherite Britain. Stockwell Open Studios was the perfect setting for Koloane to explore his personal subjectmatter among fellow artists from all backgrounds, the free mixing of people of all ethnicities, a welcome culture shock, as racial intermingling was unlawful in apartheid South Africa. Koloane would later seek the same shared studio environment in South Africa and, on his return home, would work closely with Robert Loder to establish the Thupelo Workshops. Koloane returned to South Africa in 1985, but consistently exhibited throughout the 1980s and 1990s in England (including at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (1989), the Whitechapel Gallery (1995), Pitzhanger Manor (1996) and at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS (1997)). Despite his brief time studying in England, Koloane amassed a British audience that keenly engaged with his artwork. Internationally, he showed in Africa, the USA, and Europe, including in the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013).
In his practice, Koloane employed an abstract expressionist style throughout his career to convey South Africa's socio-political climate. His visual take on the urbanisation of Johannesburg, Sunset (1990), uses muted colours: green, red, purple and crimson, with linear outlines, the dark tones suggesting the overpopulated and polluted cityscape thronged with buses, houses, and high rises, the glass panes reflecting the ambient beauty of the warm glow of the sunset. Mass Movement III (2021), powerfully presents the Black South Africans' psychological plight, the artist merging almost invisible figures, distinguishable by tonal charcoal marks - some vertical, horizontal, some curlicues - with the viewer making sense of the imagery through smears and smudges. Not limited in his subject matter, Koloane also produced a series of whimsical lithographs and sketches of township street dogs, who appear sometimes playful, such as Mgodoyi III (1993), or, in later works, sometimes more sinister, as in Street dogs at Night (2006).
Koloane received numerous awards in South Africa, including three Honorary Doctorates, from Vaal University of Technology (2008), University of the Witwatersrand (2012), and Rhodes University (2015). He founded the Fordsburg Artists' Studios (now known as the Bag Factory Artists' Studios). David Koloane died in Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa in 2019. In the UK public domain his work is held in the collections of Tate and the V&A in London.
Joy Onyejiako
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [David Koloane]
Publications related to [David Koloane] in the Ben Uri Library