Telkom today opened the Pat Mautloa exhibition in its Art Space. He has three artworks in the Telkom Art Collection.
Situated at Head Office, the Art Space was established to create an area to exhibit art and to make the art collection more accessible for employees, visitors and other business stakeholders. It was officially opened by Group CEO, Pinky Moholi on 23 May 2012. Two very successful exhibitions have since been hosted.
“Pat Mautloa is an established artist that has exhibited extensively in South Africa and abroad. We feel honoured for this established artist to exhibit at the Telkom Art Space. It is also the first time that he has exhibited in Pretoria,” says Telkom Art Curator Sophia van Wyk.
Kagiso Pat Mautloa is a Johannesburg-based artist and graduated at the Rorke’s Drift Art and Craft Centre in 1979. He was a key figure in local and international artists’ workshops of the ’80s and early ’90s that helped the emergence of a whole generation of black artists. Since 1982, Mautloa has exhibited in many solo and group shows exhibitions in Africa and abroad.
Mautloa is a master of observing everyday life of the streets. This curated selection of works reflects his observation of the self-employed urban dwellers reclaiming, sorting, and retrieving debris from the cityscape. Like the workers, Mautloa is a virtual miner, caught in the rhythm of city life, drawing inspiration from the detritus, and reclaiming the city’s decay. Most of his work is in oils and acrylic on canvas, mixed media collages as well as found object sculptures.
The result is a union of urban debris and internal reflection that sees an amalgamation of old fragments form something novel and refreshing.
Since Telkom started its art collection in 1992, it has grown into diverse collections of contemporary art in corporate South Africa.
Currently, the collection features artworks by over 400 artists, some of them well established and some still up-and-coming. Among the best-known artists whose work Telkom has bought are Walter Battiss, Bonnie Ntshalintshali, Willem Boshoff, and David Nthubu Koloane, all of whom achieved local and international recognition.