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ART SUITE

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HERE, THERE & FORWARD

BLACK PRINTS I

Neo Matloga

born 1993

Artwork Details

Artist          Neo Matloga 
Title            BLACK PRINTS I
Year            2025
Medium      Linocut, edition 4/4 (46 x 139 cm)

About the Artist

Neo Matloga (born 1993) is a South African artist born in Mamaila, Limpopo. He earned a Diploma in Visual Arts from the University of Johannesburg in 2015 and completed a residency at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, in 2018. His practice spans drawing, painting, collage and printmaking. Matloga won the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst, or Royal Award for Modern Painting, in 2018 and the ABN AMRO Art Prize in 2021.

About this Artwork

BLACK PRINTS I reflects Matloga's ongoing exploration of portraiture, identity and the complexities of self-representation. Comprising a sequence of 6 linocut portraits, the work presents a series of faces that appear both individual and interconnected.

The repeated format encourages viewers to move from one image to the next, comparing subtle shifts in expression and perspective. Printmaking plays an important role in Matloga's practice, allowing him to explore themes of memory, identity and belonging through a process of carving, repetition and transformation.

The stark contrasts characteristic of linocut emphasises the physical act of making, with each carved mark remaining visible as evidence of the artist's hand. The resulting portraits resist fixed interpretation, suggesting that identity is fluid, layered and continually shaped by personal experience, social relationships and memory. Like much of Matloga's work, BLACK PRINTS I draws attention to the ways in which people construct and perform their identities.