AUGUST 2026
ARTIST STATEMENT
Brick by Brick
Zolile Petshane is one of South Africa’s most respected and revered abstract artists. His latest body of work, Brick
by Brick, is among the most urgent and politically grounded of his career.
GDP is the gospel governments preach, but the numbers rarely reach the people. When states fail to create the
conditions for genuine job creation, they borrow instead—from the World Bank and institutions like it—entering a
cycle of debt that makes the original failure even harder to escape.
It is this structural failure that informs the paintings. Petshane turns the language of economics—its metrics, its
promises, its silences—into visceral, layered abstraction. And then he looks elsewhere for the answer.
To the trader, the entrepreneur, the hustler—every person rebuilding the economy from the ground up,
acknowledged or not.
Brick by brick.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
ZOLILE PETSHANE (b. 1973) is an abstract artist who lives and works in Kathlehong, near Johannesburg. After
studying printmaking at the renowned Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg, he obtained an Advanced Diploma in
Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2007 under the supervision of Prof. Karel Nel.
He is known for building richly layered surfaces on canvas, where colour operates like a language. Working across
media such as pastel, acrylic, and mixed media, he stacks fields of colour into energetic, sometimes landscapelike compositions, then disrupts them with scratched textures, marks, fragments of text, numbers, and symbols.
These additions act as visual “notes” that hint at lived experience—belief systems, consumer culture, politics, and
memory—without becoming literal illustration. The work rewards close looking: beneath the punch of colour is a
dense, deliberate structure and a restless, investigative intelligence.
Petshane has exhibited extensively both locally and internationally, and his work can be found in several
corporate collections, as well as in the permanent collection of the JAG (Johannesburg Art Gallery).
MAY 2026
ARTIST STATEMENT
ZOLILE PETSHANE (b. 1973) is an abstract artist who lives and works in Kathlehong, near Johannesburg. After studying printmaking at the renowned Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg, he obtained an Advanced Diploma in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2007, under the supervision of Prof. Karel Nel.
He is known for building richly layered surfaces on canvas, where colour operates like a language. Working across media such as pastel, acrylic, and mixed media, he constructs fields of colour into energetic, sometimes landscape-like compositions, then disrupts them with scratched textures, marks, fragments of text, numbers, and symbols. These additions act as visual “notes” that hint at lived experience—belief systems, consumer culture, politics, and memory—without becoming literal illustration. The work rewards close looking: beneath the vibrancy of colour lies a dense, deliberate structure and a restless, investigative intelligence.
Petshane has exhibited extensively both locally and internationally, and his work can be found in several corporate collections, as well as in the permanent collection of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG).
