Nkhensani Mkhari is a post-disciplinary artist and curator. He recently worked at the David Krut Workshop on a series of unique painterly prints.
Mkhari’s work caught David Krut’s eye with a series of paintings he showed with Church Gallery at the Johannesburg Art Fair in 2024. Mkhari’s paintings were intimate, minimal colour field paintings that reminded Krut of Agnes Martin’s work.
Krut connected with Mkhari and their like-minded passion for complex art theory, and deep thinking about art produced a destined collaborative relationship. Krut refers to Mkhari’s practice as steeped in a particular understanding of culture. Krut invited him to spend time at the workshop with the team.
Mkhari spent a day in September 2024 at the David Krut workshop working with Printer Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim directly after the fair. This was his chance to experiment with the medium of monotype – a unique painterly printing process. Mkhari produced 5 small monotypes, bright in colour, based on abstract memories of places he’d recently visited.
Mkhari returned to the studio in November 2024 continuing into the new year, this time working with printer Roxy Kaczmarek. Kaczmarek challenged Mkhari to step away from the act of painting purely with brushes and encouraged the use of layering, masking, drawing with found items like leaves, and other unconventional mark-making tools. Allowing material to become the medium.
“In this series of prints, I interrogate the cartography of perception—how we see, remember, and reconstruct landscapes across cultural and technological interfaces. Drawing from my previous exploration of institutional archives and digital mediations, these works continue to excavate the phenomenological essence of place, but now through a more intimate lens of botanical, geological, and aerial imaginations.” – Mkhari 2025
The product is a series of complex colour fields, landscapes, and ‘conversations’ resisting literal geographical representation, which rather “speak to the fluid boundaries between observation, memory, and imagination.” Mkhari plays with colour and texture, upending the way the viewer potentially perceives the work. Are we looking from an aerial perspective, or are we perhaps looking up or diving onto a horizontal plane?
“The prints challenge traditional Western notions of landscape as a static, conquerable terrain. Instead, they propose landscape as a living dialogue—a constant negotiation between human perception, technological mediation, and ecological complexity. By abstracting these images, I destabilize fixed perspectives, inviting viewers to reimagine how we encounter and interpret spatial narratives.” – Mkhari 2025
The works culminated in an exhibition that opened at the 151 Blue House gallery on 15 April 2025.
View the works here:
Nkhensani Mkhari – Mavonelo: Perspectives
Take a listen to Mkhari and Kaczmarek in discussion about the process and presentation of the works.
Apophenia: Nkhensani Mkhari in Conversation with Roxy Kaczmarek.
View more works by the artist here: https://davidkrutprojects.com/artists/75070/nkhensani-mkhari
For more information contact [email protected]