In their first exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Radio Juxtapoz and featured artist alum Dada Khanyisa presents a group of ‘sculptural paintings’ that look to their immediate community in Cape Town, popular culture, and Khanyisa’s extensive research into the social and political histories of South Africa, producing lively figurative assemblages that convey the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary life. Throughout their labour-intensive practice – incorporating hand carved wood, meticulously compiled sculptural elements and found objects, and painted backdrops borrowed from candid or historic photographic sources – Khanyisa expresses interpersonal dynamics through the lens of their social observations and lived experience.
this is for you foregrounds nostalgia and shared histories – documented and fictional – as a device to evaluate the present, using the formal aspects and personal associations of photography to communicate social performativity and perception. Works are composed like photographs or scrapbooks, with figures choreographed into archetypal poses and gestures collaged against other three-dimensional aspects – both representational and abstract. Characters and references are pulled from a range of sources, rejecting hierarchy by looking to friends and family, art history, social documentation, and media cultures in equal measure; a painted panel partially concealed behind vertical blinds in 70 years ago (2025) appropriates a scene from Lionel Rogosin’s 1959 film Come Back, Africa, which sits comfortably alongside Ria (2020-25), a portrait of a sultry antagonist from the early 2000s South African teen drama Yizo Yizo.
Khanyisa builds scope for experimentation into their process, employing an extensive repertoire of materials, textures and finishes in their constructions. Having studied Traditional and Digital Animation, intuitive modernist shapes expertly intersect with the artist’s distinctive figuration, with skilful painted panels adding an unexpected realism to the compositions. Humour is innate to Khanyisa’s practice, used to grapple with consequential subjects whilst retaining a sense of levity – … (2025) speaks to generational disillusionment, featuring a lone female figure weeping in the bathroom of a nightclub after one too many margaritas, having lost a false eyelash, mascara running down her face… Intertwined lovers embody the complexities of youth in Sammy and Boipelo (2025), the young couple lifted from the pages of Phaswane Mpe’s 2001 novel Welcome to Our Hillbrow, in which they both meet untimely deaths in an inner-city, post-apartheid Johannesburg neighbourhood.
Found objects act as signifiers for time and place, evoking recent histories and contemporary consumerism: a 1990s Nokia mobile phone, a coupe cocktail glass, an ostrich leather handbag, a vintage rotary phone… Khanyisa states in our Spring 2024 feature: “I try to include local items in my work…I think it’s important as far as grounding the work in a location. I wouldn’t say the people are particular or specific, but these are the people I’m around, and I’m interested in presenting a wider image of the people I have around.”
