Sandile Zulu
Sandile Zulu (b. 1962) is a South African artist who works with fire to create works that give expression to his wide-ranging interests in astronomy, science, and pan-African philosophy, in which the artist becomes a scavenger after urban waste and debris. His work encapsulates his awareness of South Africa’s historical context and the period of time in which he grew up, often exploring the tension between exclusion and inclusion, history and the present.
Sandile Zulu (b. 1962) is an abstract artist from South Africa. He was born in KwaZulu-Natal in Ixopo. He began his formal education in the arts in 1982, studying first at Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre, before going on to further his studies at Natal Technikon and the University of the Witwatersrand, receiving his degree in 1993. . He has exhibited extensively since the early 1990s in solo and group exhibitions locally and in the United States, the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, and Belgium. Zulu is represented in private and public collections around the world, including the Museum for African Art, New York, Iziko National Gallery, Cape Town, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, as well as in the Vodacom, Sasol, MTN and Deutsche Securities corporate collections. His solo exhibitions include ARTOMS: Histopathology, Regeneration and Other Cases at SMAC Gallery in Stellenbosch in 2012, and Fire This Time: Planetary Circle, at the October Gallery, London, in 2005.
Zulu came of age during a time when he routinely experienced the unequal access to land, education and resources that defined the apartheid era in South Africa. An awareness of these inequities and the tensions between exclusion and inclusion, history and the present, continue to inflect his work. Yet he is motivated by a combination of the creative imagination and a philosophical outlook that motivates his visual explorations of the interconnectedness of all things--cells, bodies, plants and planets; art, science and philosophy. It was at Witswatersrand that Zulu began his first experiments with fire.
Zulu also featured in the Artists in Dialogue Series at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington in 2011 and is the subject of the book TAXI-012 Sandile ZULU, published by David Krut in 2005. Zulu has received many awards, including the President's Award Grand Prize in the Seychelles Biennale of Contemporary Art in 1998. He has also been a longtime collaborator with David Krut Projects, with a solo exhibition in 2005. He has been featured in several solo shows at David Krut Projects.
