Yolanda Mazwana –
AFTER MIDNIGHT

10.04.21 – 27.04.21
Solo Exhibition at
Kalashnikovv Gallery,
Johannesburg

Text by Khumo Sebambo

Yolanda Mazwana (b. 1996 – Eastern Cape, South Africa) is a self-taught visual artist based in Johannesburg. Her work is centred around mental illness, popular culture, phobias, relationships and storytelling and her style being described as an amalgamation of abstract expressionism, neo-expressionism and symbolism. 

After Midnight features new paintings on canvas and on paper, many of which were created during Yolanda Mazwana’s recent residency at the Nirox Art Foundation. The artist continues to explore the concept of fear and understanding the distinction between rational or “real fear” and the irrational ”free-floating fear”. Drawing from the dank layers of the mind, Mazwana has created a strange cast of creatures. “I created these creatures that are half-human and half-creature as a way to merge together the rational and irrational. It’s been a process that involves trying to realise the difference between the two and understand those emotions in a bigger sense,” says the artist. Without using theatrical dynamics to achieve it, fear (or an eerie feeling at the least) is an event that manifests itself in Yolanda’s work.

Soft, supple and human-like their pink forms float ominously in an opaque background made of a solution of blue paint and water. The artist didn’t intend for the figures to be the unsettling and grotesque forms that they are, ‘it just sort of happened’, Mazwana says. These creatures and landscapes are in fact richly personal to the artist who has endowed them with emotions. She describes them as feeling ‘more afraid than they are scary’. The source of their fears being the internal struggle caused by experiencing heightened levels of anxiety and exaggerated or irrational thought patterns related to hypochondria.