Walkabout of Mpai exhibition

Traveller’ is the title of an exhibition of works by Clifford Mpai which opened at the FynArts Gallery last week, in collaboration with the Liebrecht Gallery in Somerset West. This collection of Mpai’s drawings in lead and coloured pencil were directly inspired by his overseas visits; works that were exhibited abroad; and also works that illustrate how effortlessly the artist bridges the divide between the urban and rural.

Born near Pietersburg (now Polokwane), Clifford left school at 14 and worked several jobs in Johannesburg before being employed by the Oppenheimer family at their Parktown home, Little Brenthurst, as a gardener and waiter.

Here he resumed his childhood passion for drawing and his talent was recognised by Strilli Oppenheimer, who enrolled him for weekly art classes at Bill Anslie's Johannesburg Art Foundation in 1984.

At a time when other black artists were producing political works, Clifford specialised in colourful drawings of rural and urban environments, from the modest homes in his village of Phoffu, to the suburban gardens of Little Brenthurst, and the buildings and highways of Johannesburg.

His style was often to draw from an angled perspective, flattening forms and altering the scale to create a world of structured fantasy characterised by what has been described as “a strange silence”. Art critic Ivor Powell concluded that “Mpai’s drawings represent the resounding triumph of the naïve sensibility over the complexities of 20th-century consciousness.”

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