Southern Guild will participate in Untitled Art in Miami for the first time this year from Tuesday, 29 November through Saturday, 3 December 2022. The gallery will present a vibrant group exhibition of sculpture, painting and multi-media works by nine established and emerging artists from across the African continent.

Southern Guild’s diverse presentation for Untitled Art speaks to the potency of creativity and its capacity to transmute experiences, offering catharsis to the individual and collective through lightness of being. The gallery’s booth will feature a series of woven rubber works by multimedia artist Patrick Bongoy (DRC), paintings by artists Jozua Gerrard (South Africa) and Yolanda Mazwana (South Africa), sculpture by Dominique Zinkpè (Benin), ceramics by Shirley Fintz (Zimbabwe/South Africa) and Xanthe Somers (Zimbabwe/UK), bronze sculpture by Justine Mahoney (South Africa), collaged paper works by Galia Gluckman (South Africa) and abstract reliefs by Julio Rizhi (Zimbabwe).

The presentation, in its explosive physicality and diverse form, draws on the experience of colour as a means for aesthetic exploration. Cape Town-based ceramicist Shirley Fintz offers five vividly coloured glazed stoneware forms from her series, The Healers, that correspond with the colours of the energetic chakras within the body.  Fintz’s sculptures reference her own collection of wooden spirit-spouse figures found in the Ivory Coast, Ghana and Nigeria.

The two wall-hung works by Patrick Bongoy, made from recycled rubber inner tubes, speak to the brutal colonial history of his native Congo. However, through Bongoy’s arduous and intimate creative process, the artist has allowed the light-absorbing and industrial material to become whimsical, intricate, even delicate, in its reconstructed skin. Similarly, Zimbabwean artist Julio Rizhi’s work transforms mountains of discarded plastic into visceral abstract reliefs, with the molten material forming a surreal, globular landscape.  Rizhi’s dysmorphic constructions speak to the social and environmental cost of his country’s collapse.

Dominique Zinkpè’s assemblages consist of countless carved wooden Ibeji dolls that evoke the Yoruba concept of twinship. Drawing on animist beliefs, each unit of Zinkpè’s sculpture is uniquely carved as a subtle yet profound reminder of the uniqueness of every individual, coming together en masse like a super organism.

Untitled Art 2022 marks the first time Jozua Gerrard and Yolanda Mazwana will be participating in an international art fair. Both emerging artists, their works are permeated by a sense of freedom and sensuality, filtered through their own subjective experience. There is an abundance that tips over into excess in other presented works. Xanthe Somers’ elaborate large-scale ceramic work, The Circus, explores the remnants of the Christian-colonial gaze in Southern Africa, while Galia Gluckman’s effusive paper constructions from her Soirée Series posit a sense of melancholia and disorientation behind their joyful luminescence.

Collectively, Southern Guild’s presentation is a dynamic imagining of what is and what could possibly be. Each of the featured works reach outwards to other worlds, confronting us with their lively presence even as they invite us to envision something beyond it.