Blessing Ngobeni

Montague Contemporary is pleased to present What the Paper Remembers, the first solo exhibition in New York by the South African artist Blessing Ngobeni.

Ngobeni builds his figures out of newsprint, advertising and found paper, torn up and worked into acrylic. His material is the discarded record of a country's public life. A newspaper is supposed to hold the account of what happened, and these paintings ask what is left of that account once it has been shredded, and who did the shredding.

Ngobeni works across painting, collage, sculpture, video animation, sound installation and live performance. He is best known for large-scale symbolic paintings that indict the failure of post-apartheid promises of equality, drawing on Surrealism, Dadaism and Neo-Expressionism. Collage is a political method for him rather than a formal one, a way of showing how history gets edited and how corruption repeats itself. The paintings are dense and they reward standing close. Advertising slogans surface and submerge, faces assemble out of fragments of other faces, and the printed residue of daily life becomes the material of the figure. His ongoing Mirror Soft Life series looks at the social consciousness and inherited structures that keep oppressive systems in motion.

His titles place present-day extraction inside a much older colonial inheritance. The Song of the Chicotte takes its name from the hippopotamus-hide whip used in the Belgian Congo. Others include Enemy of Foe and Skeletons at Work. Artspace has named him among the most important African painters working today.