Manyaku Mashilo was born in 1991 in Limpopo, South Africa and is currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. Mashilo is a self taught multidisciplinary artist who creates mixed media paintings.

Dedicated to the act of cherishing lineage, Manyaku Mashilo creates otherworldly re-imaginings with precise linework. The portraits capture the self, representing a black, queer community cloaked, clothed and bathed in celestial cartographies. The enmeshed figures perform a multiplication of  mappings piecing together dimensions of time, place and space, offering the land and the body as
the source of a complex question of spiritual identity.

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Mashilo will present a solo presentation at the ART X Lagos 2021 at Victoria Island in Lagos Nigeria as well as at Bonne Esperance Gallery in Paris, France in 2021. Mashilo’s work will also be included in 99 Loop Gallery’s group presentation at the 2022 Investec Cape Town Art Fair.  In 2020 Mashilo’s work was included in notable group shows The Medium is the Message curated by Azu Nwagbogu at Unit London in London, UK, as well as Liminality in Infinite Space at the African Artists Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria. Both the exhibitions spotlighting artists that form part of the new vanguard in the field of contemporary African figuration. Mashilo’s work was also included in the 2020 Prizm Art Fair titled NOIR, NOIR: Meditations on African Cinema and its influence on Visual Art curated by Mikhaile Solomon and William Cordova in Miami, USA.  In the same year she presented her solo exhibition There are other worlds they have not told you of, at 99 Loop Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, and The Possibility of a Journey, curated by Tammy Langtry as part of the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, South Africa, both in 2020. Earlier solo exhibitions include: There’s an Exhibition in My Kitchen at Breaking Bread in 2019 and Beauty | Skin |Beholder at The New Heritage Gallery in 2017, both in Cape Town. Her past group exhibitions include: She Impressions at the Project Space in Johannesburg in 2019; Sunday Service at GUS in Stellenbosch and The Numbers Exhibition at Hazard Gallery in Johannesburg in 2018; La Gravitas at La Provence Gallery in Franshoek in 2017.
Mashilo’s work forms part of the Tiroche Deleon Collection and The Suzie Wong Collection.