Joel Mamboka N’Kumu is an artist born in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He now lives and works in the heart of downtown Cape Town, South Africa.
His artistic practice had begun in high school, where he and his group of artist friends were known for their portrait work. It was there that he met his mentor, Achille Katemo, with whom he founded the Innovation Art Studio in Kinshasa, after the end of their studies. Nkumu came to Cape Town in 2013, aiming to establish himself as an artist. He started working in a scullery at a nightclub in Cape Town’s famous club area, Bree Street.
Luckily, the blackboard designer who was supposed to come on-site to draw a burger didn’t come and the resident chef bought Nkumu a set of colored chalks. He drew the picture on the restaurant’s specialty board and the manager was surprised to learn that he was the one who drew it. She immediately set out to help him on his journey as an artist in Cape Town and successfully negotiated his access to participate in the Cape Town Emerging Artists Program held at Zeitz MOCAA in 2019.
Joel Mamboka Nkumu’s first exhibition in South Africa was at Zeitz MOCAA Museum as part of the city’s emerging artists program in 2019. He then thereafter featured in a group exhibition at the Zeitz Museum for Contemporary Art Africa; titled Home is Where the art is. He has been part of several group exhibitions, with two solo exhibitions at Youngblood Gallery.
Nkumu’s artistic practice has allowed his works of art to be featured in a digital gallery based in the United States, The BlackArt House, and in Kenya at the Bobu Africa Gallery. In 2020.
In this body of work, he highlights the African loincloth (whose origin is well known to be complex) with a character of a fairly free realism, but who imposes by its presence and accentuates by the ascending perspective. The parallel bars above the characters and in the backgrounds of the paintings seem to
refer to the zebra crossing and reinforce the very urban character of the paintings, playing with asymmetry and evoking in a certain way Pop art and New realism.
‘I have been painting for a decade. Although being an artist is a difficult tussle between my inner dreamer and my critic, I have come to love this process very much. It not only taught me a lot about the world but also about myself.’
