Louis Maqhubela was born to Xhosa parents in South Africa in 1939. During 1957‒59, while still attending high school, he started studying part-time under artists Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Komalo at the Polly Street Centre in Johannesburg. After spending time with the South African expatriate artist, Douglas Portway, in Cornwall, England, Maqhubela embraced a new direction towards modernist abstraction. In 1978 he settled in London, where he attended Goldsmiths' College and the Slade School of Fine Art (University of London).
Painter Louis Maqhubela was born to Xhosa parents in Durban, South Africa in 1939. The family moved to Johannesburg in 1951, with Maqhubela attending Nakene High School in Orlando, Soweto, one of the city's townships. In 1957‒59, while still attending high school, Maqhubela began studying part-time under artists Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Komalo at the Polly Street Centre in Johannesburg. At a time of increasing apartheid restrictions, Polly Street, the first large-scale urban art centre in South Africa, emerged as a place where black artists could learn their craft, participate in practical and theoretical discussions and read art books and magazines. Here white artists could meet their black compatriots and share their skills as volunteer teachers. As Maqhubela recalled, Polly Street ‘became our magical password, our ID, to break into the exclusive echelons of the Johannesburg art scene, 'worthy' to exhibit as equals. That is the legacy of Cecil Skotnes […]' (Vigil of Departure’s press release). Maqhubela continued studying at Polly Street's successor, the Jubilee Art Centre, well into the 1960s. In 1959 one of Maqhubela's paintings was included in the second exhibition entitled Artists of Fame and Promise, organised by the Adler Fielding Gallery in Johannesburg. Subsequently Maqhubela participated in several group exhibitions, while simultaneously employed as a commercial artist designing record covers. He also worked as a decorative plasterer and mosaicist in the housing section of the Non-European Affairs Department, creating embellishments and mosaics for several schools and government buildings in Soweto.
In spite of working in a hostile apartheid environment, Maqhubela was hailed as the first black painter of distinction, winning first prize in the 1967 instalment of the Artists of Fame and Promise exhibition in Johannesburg. The award came with a three-month travel bursary to Europe and England. Maqhubela's trip abroad exposed him to European art and artists, including Paul Klee, and, in particular, he spent some time with the South African expatriate painter, Douglas Portway, in Cornwall, England. Both interested in expressing, through their art, ‘creativity and expression beyond observed reality’, Maqhubela and Portway immediately recognised in each other kindred spirits (Smith 2022). This experience offered Maqhubela a means to break out of the conventions and stylistic mannerisms of a genre that had been labelled 'Township Art': the depiction of everyday activities and the way of life in black urban environments created under apartheid. Maqhubela's new direction meant the end of figurative expressionism and the beginning of a personal engagement with modernist abstraction, accompanied by the development of an artistic language and iconography exploring philosophical and religious themes. His work now became less about recording views of his environment, or observed reality, and more about using line, form, shape and colour as expressive means in and of themselves. His work was included in the London exhibitions African Artists at the Piccadilly Gallery (1965) and Contemporary African Arts, Camden Arts Centre (1969).
After further prizes, Maqhubela left South Africa in 1973, moving first to Ibiza, Spain, and then to London in 1978, where he settled with his family. He attended Goldsmiths' College (1984‒85, now Goldsmiths, University of London) and the Slade School of Art (University College London, 1985‒88), where he gained a Post Graduate Diploma in Printmaking. Inspired by his new environment, and artists such as Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and John McLean, his work became increasingly abstract, with ‘ectoplastic drawn images and knotted linear configurations emerging from and disappearing into the delicate layers of colour’ (Martin 1991). His painting Untitled XIX (1990), with its yellows, blues, greens, purple and orange, was characteristic of the palette and technique of his works in gouache on paper. Commenting on his practice, Maqhubela stated that ‘Even abstract art by a black practitioner was a declaration of war against being stereotyped, bearing in mind that abstraction has, for centuries, always been Africa’s premier form of expression. Why would our ancestral form of expression suddenly be deemed ‘foreign’ to the black man of the 20th century?’ (as cited in Martin 2010, p. 16).
Maqhubela visited South Africa in 1994, when Mandela was elected President, and several times throughout the 2000s. Most recently, he visited his home country in 2010, for the opening of his major retrospective, A Vigil of Departure, 1960‒2010. This long-awaited survey opened at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, and toured to Iziko National Gallery of South Africa, Cape Town and to the Durban Art Gallery. This was the first occasion in which Maqhubela's work, drawn from five decades, could be viewed in his own country. Louis Maqhubela died on 6 November 2021 at St Thomas’ hospital in London, England. His works are held in UK public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and British Museum, London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Louis Maqhubela]
Publications related to [Louis Maqhubela] in the Ben Uri Library