"The Sky is coming home" by Kemang Wa Lehulere features dynamic brushstrokes in monochrome, creating an abstract composition with a sense of motion and fragmentation. The drawing depicts scattered, swirling forms that suggest both disintegration and coalescence. Wa Lehulere’s use of minimalistic, expressive lines evokes themes of memory and history interconnected with the South African experience. The artist’s work, often reflecting on the legacy of Apartheid, uses these abstract forms to explore the tension between liberation and repression in South Africa's socio-political past and present. ...
Kemang Wa Lehulere’s practice engages with the past of South Africa, tracing the ways it still haunts the country’s current condition. Working with personal and collective histories and archives, the artist repeatedly employs found objects representing both individual and collective memory. Wooden, old-looking school desks or mass-produced ceramic sculptures of Alsatian dogs are at once familiar and alienating; a reminder from childhood also acting as a reminder of the complexity of social structures within the Apartheid regime of South Africa. Inspired by set design and theatre, Wa Lehulere’s drawings and ‘living sculptures’, comprising smudged chalk drawings on blackboards, sculptures made of grass and soil and wall etchings, further dwell on the processes of revision, juxtaposition and the malfunction of histories. By making history physical and personal, the artist contrasts liberation with repression and sharply connects the painful past with a painful present. ...
