Meleko Mokgosi: Democratic Intuition

On view at Gagosian is Meleko Mokgosi’s first solo exhibition in Europe, drawn from his grand project “Democratic Intuition” (2014-2019). Mokgosi’s artistic practice combines history painting with cinematic montage, incorporating elements of religion iconography, advertising, and political propaganda from southern Africa and the United States to produce a layering of imagery both familiar and unfamiliar. “Democratic Intuition” is an eight-part epic that features multi-panel depictions of southern African life and folklore. The artist developed this concept and its internal contradictions through compelling genre scenes, ranging from the confines of manual work, the freedoms of intellectual enterprise and their ties to gender and race. In the exhibition, viewers will find Bread, Butter, and Power (2018), an elaborate twenty-one-panel panoramic painting, full of references to recent histories and Objects of Desire, a series of individual small paintings of Afrocentric beauty advertisements, Paleolithic cave paintings and contemporary African objects.