"Then I knew I was good at painting."
Dr Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935, Middelburg, South Africa) is one of the most iconic figures in contemporary African art and a global ambassador of Ndebele culture. Taught to paint at the age of ten by her mother and grandmother, according to a tradition entrusted exclusively to women, she was the first to carry Ndebele geometric design beyond the walls of homes into contemporary media: canvases, ceramics, sculptures, aircraft and automobiles. In 1991 she created the first African BMW Art Car, following Warhol and Lichtenstein, and in 2020 Rolls-Royce named a Phantom "The Mahlangu" in her honour. A participant in "Magiciens de la Terre" (1989), Documenta IX (1992) and the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), she celebrated her first major retrospective in Cape Town in 2024. Her works are held in the Centre Pompidou, the Brooklyn Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum, among over twenty-seven public collections worldwide. She lives in rural Mpumalanga.