"My mother and grandmother taught me to paint when I was ten years old."
Dr Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935, Middelburg, Mpumalanga, South Africa) began painting at the age of ten, taught by her mother and grandmother according to the Ndebele tradition in which mural painting, renewed for rites of passage, is entrusted exclusively to women. From that inheritance of geometric forms, triangular modules repeated with rigorous symmetry, figures drawn in clear black line, flat and vivid colours, she built one of the most recognizable visual languages in world art, executed to this day freehand, without preliminary drawing or straight edge, using chicken feathers and bundled twigs.
Mahlangu was the first to reimagine Ndebele design in contemporary media, transferring it from the walls of Mabhoko, the village where she still lives, onto canvas, ceramics, sculpture, design objects and vehicles. Her international consecration came with "Magiciens de la Terre" at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1989), for which the facade of her painted house was recreated, followed by Documenta IX, Kassel (1992). In 1991 BMW invited her to create the twelfth BMW Art Car: the first by a woman and the first by an African artist, after Warhol, Lichtenstein, Calder and Stella; the car was exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington (1994), whose facade Mahlangu painted the same year, and at the British Museum, London (2017). British Airways followed with an aircraft tail (1997), Fiat with a 500 painted for "Why Africa?" at the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin (2007), and collaborations with Comme des Garçons, John Legend and Belvedere Vodka, Eytys and others; in 2020 Rolls-Royce commissioned her to paint the gallery of a new Phantom, named "The Mahlangu" in her honour. Beyond her practice, she has founded a school in her village, transferring her knowledge to new generations so that Ndebele art may continue to travel the world.
Her recognitions include the Order of Ikhamanga (Silver) from the South African government (2006), four honorary doctorates (University of Johannesburg, Durban University of Technology, Tshwane University of Technology, UNISA), the rank of Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic (2019) and a United Nations award (2019). In 2024 she took part in the 60th Venice Biennale, "Foreigners Everywhere", while the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, opened the first major retrospective of her career, "Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting: Esther Mahlangu", which travelled to the Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, where her BMW Art Car returned to South Africa after more than thirty years, and continues its international tour; the same October she unveiled "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu", her first public mural in the United Kingdom, commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries for Frieze London. In Italy her work has been presented by Antonella Pisilli in a curatorial dialogue spanning nearly fifteen years: from the group exhibition "L'Africa nei loro occhi" (Viterbo, 2010) to the solo focus "Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi: Esther Mahlangu" at Kyo Noir Studio (2016), accompanied by an interview with the artist, to "Africam EXPLORO" (2023), until "Beyond the Wall: Esther Mahlangu and Ndebele Culture between Tradition and Contemporaneity" (2024), the exhibition that inaugurated Black Liquid Art Gallery's Rome venue, again with an exclusive video interview by the curator. Her works are represented in over twenty-seven public institutional collections worldwide. She lives and works in Mpumalanga, South Africa.