Around a radio, in a pressed suit, at the jazz session: Sibiya paints the self-respect of men whom history tried to reduce to labour.
Bambo Sibiya (Bambolwami Jose Sibiya, b. 1986, KwaThema, Springs, South Africa) trained during his school years at the Mbira School of Music and Art under the late Paul Madi Phala, and completed a Design certificate at Benoni Technical College in 2006, opening with a friend a small graphic design business producing logos and pamphlets for local entrepreneurs. It was Phala who recommended him to Artist Proof Studio (APS), Johannesburg, where he attended the Saturday printmaking programme while supporting himself; his determination and natural talent convinced the teacher Lucas Nkgweng to recommend him as a full-time student, and in 2008 he was offered a full bursary to enter the second year. Sibiya recalls that he had caught "the printmaking bug". His maturity earned him the patronage of Clive H. Viveiros, founder of Pinpoint One Human Resources, a long-standing partner of APS, while his internship as assistant gallery curator exposed him to the work of professional artists: he collaborated on the large-scale linocuts of William Kentridge, Diane Victor, Norman Catherine and Colbert Mashile, an experience of scale and power that pushed his own work toward more ambitious formats.
Encouraged to develop his content through art-historical research, Sibiya was drawn to the social realists, to Hogarth's allegories, Goya's Disasters of War and Diane Victor's Disasters of Peace, before finding his own subjects in the life around him: an early, accomplished series on single mothers as heads of household, rooted in the experience of his own mother, and then the world of the migrant labour communities. His signature cycle portrays the Swenkas: during apartheid, men from rural areas journeyed to the cities for work and bought stylish suits to impress the families left behind, a practice that evolved into competitions of elegance among working-class Zulu men, founded on cleanliness, sobriety and, above all, self-respect. In linocut, lithography, drypoint and charcoal and acrylic on canvas, richly detailed and textured, Sibiya restores to these men, and to the jazz sessions, radios and rituals of township life, the dignity of protagonists, guided by the philosophy of Ubuntu Ngabantu, "I am what I am because of who we all are".
Sibiya's rise through South African competitions culminated in 2012, when he was a finalist in the Absa L'Atelier top ten, won the Gerard Sekoto Award and was named most promising visual artist at the Arts and Culture Trust Awards; the Sekoto prize took him in 2013 to residencies at the Atelier le Grand Village, Angoulême, where his first lithographs on the Swenkas were editioned, and at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Solo exhibitions include "Tales of Migration" (2017), "Ubuntu Ngabantu" (2017), "Izikhali ze Mpilo" (2018) and "Umdlalo Wamaphepha" (2019) at Jack Bell Gallery, London, and "Freedom Did Not Just Come" at CIRCA, Johannesburg (2019), with group exhibitions including "The Portrait Show" at Everard Read, Johannesburg (2020), 1-54 New York (2018) and "Faces & Figures: Identity through Printmaking between DC and South Africa" at Mason Exhibitions, Arlington (2024). His works are held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the national collection of prints, and in international collections including the Arak Collection. He lives and works near Johannesburg.