Paul Sekete
Paul Sekete was born in 1957 in the Orange Free State. After his schooling, he worked as a miner for a year prior to joining the Katlehong Art Centre. He is a self trained artist, and works both as a sculptor and as a painter. Sekete has participated in numerous group exhibitions in South Africa, Namibia and abroad. His first solo exhibition was held at Gallery 21 in Johannesburg in 1990. His media include clay, wood, linocut, woodcut, oil and acrylic,while some of his sculptures have been cast in bronze.
Sekete uses distortion, elongation, and disproportionate scale to describe the human form and combines these with well defined linear shapes. Sekete´s imagery often conjures up a sense of the neon township - forms remembered from a street corner, somewhere. His light brushstrokes evoke the monumental out of the ordinary; the “extraordinariness” of the ordinary. A hat at a jaunty angle, a bright sacred necklace, oh, and there´s a man running and that lady, she´s waving … greeting!
In 1999 Paul Sekete left the townships of Johannesburg for Cape Town, and now he divides his time between there and his home town in the Free State. Not surprisingly the “neon township” has made way for a more earthy, rustic palette and Sekete has evolved his language, a secret script that describes his world and invites us to journey with him to places and possibilities that are both real and imagined; familiar yet mysterious.
