Nicholas Hlobo

Nicholas Hlobo (born 1975, in Cape Town, South Africa) has a multidisciplinary practice that explores masculinity, sexuality, Xhosa identity, ritual, and the tensions between tradition and contemporary life in post-apartheid South Africa. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing, performance, and works on paper, Hlobo examines intimacy, desire, cultural inheritance, and social transformation through materially dense forms made from rubber inner tubes, ribbon, leather, lace, and found objects.  Hlobo studied Fine Art at Technikon Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, earning his Bachelor of Technology in 2002. His work often engages ritual, language, abstraction, queer identity, and social history, using cutting, stitching, binding, and layered material assemblage to consider healing, conflict, embodiment, and the afterlives of colonialism and patriarchy. The visible seams and “baseball” stitching in his sculptures have become central to his visual language, signaling rupture, repair, and the unstable boundaries between categories such as masculine and feminine, sacred and bodily, personal and political.  His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Venice Biennale, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, SCAD Museum of Art, Uppsala Konstmuseum, and Museum Beelden aan Zee. He has received the Tollman Award for Visual Art Standard Bank Young Artist Award, the VILLA Extraordinary Award for Sculpture, and he was a Rolex Visual Arts Protégé.  Nicholas Hlobo lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.