Exhibition 'Neo Matloga: Neo to Love' in Fries Museum
Neo Image Matloga was born in 1993 in Mamaila, a small town in Limpopo province, South Africa. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he completed a two-year residency at De Ateliers. Matloga works with drawing, painting and collage to make large-scale mixed media pieces on paper or canvas, depicting domestic scenes which capture memories of daily life during the artist’s upbringing. These monochromatic works play with surrealism and perspective, pushing light, shadow and line to the edge of abstraction. The artist’s practice is a meditation on the healing properties of family and home, showing fragments of happiness and togetherness in the midst of struggle, and the new hope which was emerging at the time – hope for a democratic future after the end of Apartheid.
After participating in the De Ateliers residency in Amsterdam from 2016 to 2018, Matloga participated as a guest artist at the Thami Mnyele foundation and then completed the Zeitz MOCAA Artist in Residence at Segera - Laikipia, Kenya. Most recently he was invited to work at AVL (Atelier Van Lieshout) Mundo in Rotterdam, where most of the works from the show were rendered. In 2018 he won the Royal Award for Modern Painting in the Netherlands. Matloga is a nominee for the Volkskrant Visual Art Prize 2019.
