Bicycle rider ,1968
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Notes : The bulk of Ephraim Ngatane’s oeuvre was produced in the period 1959-1969, largely when the artist was in his 20s. He was prolific during this time, often exhibiting more than once in almost every year, and predominantly at the Adler Fielding Galleries in Johannesburg. In 1964, the William Humphries Art Gallery in Kimberley became the first of many public museums to acquire his work.While Ngatane’s produced watercolours and oils throughout his life, watercolours predominate up to the mid-1960s, most likely as a result of his mentorship by Durant Sihlali, first at the Polly Street Art Centre, and then as part of Sihlali’s weekend painters club. Then, as with many exhibiting black artists at the time, he was encouraged and nudged into oils. Fortunately, Ngatane was equally adept in both media, merging and modulating colours, using white lines to emphasise reflected surfaces, and black lines to outline forms in and amongst the maze of colours.Ngatane pushed towards abstraction at a time when realism was the mode in which many ‘township’ artists chose (or were forced by economic necessity) to make work. A feature of Ngatane’s abstracted oils was his deft use of a palette knife to apply the paint. Oil colours often combined with sand or Plaster of Paris to create richly textured surfaces. Ngatane’s ability to make an oil painting look like a shimmering stained glass window, dynamic with movement and energy, could never be matched by his many imitators, who were unable to manipulate the palette knife beyond simple, static and block-like applications of colour.Bicycle Rider (1968) is one such iridescent painting. Cyclists and stray dogs are common in the iconography of Ngatane’s oil paintings, suggesting, if unintentionally, the transience of living under the wills and whims of apartheid’s laws. Bicycle Riders was produced when Ngatane was at the peak of his powers. From 1969, the quality of his paintings began to falter as he succumbed to repeated bouts of tuberculosis, and exacerbated by the death of his wife in a car accident (in which he was at the wheel) in early 1970.
Rory Bester
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