Nat Mokgosi: The horse rider - SOLD
Nat Mokgosi (b 1946)
The horse rider - 1974
Pencil on paper
102,5 x 79,5 cm
Signed and dated bottom left
Sold - 2011
Nathaniel Ntwayakgosi Mokgosi was born in Newclare near Sophiatown, Johannesburg. He studied under Ezrom Legae and Bill Hart at the Jubilee Art Centre from 1961 to 1963, and at the Lionel Abrahams Art School from 1964 until 1968. Described as one of South Africa’s best art teachers, Mokgosi went on to teach artists like Winston Saoli and Ben Macala, but focused on his own professional art career from 1970.
Mokgosi’s unique style, synthesised from the influences of his teachers, Ezrom Legae and Bill Hart, combines his bold cross-hatching technique with the use of powerful expressive colour. His interests in social realism and surrealism often combine when presenting African legends and folklore, resulting in elements of anthropomorphism; the attributing of human characteristics to animals.
Equestrianism became a popular theme in art, especially during the Classical period when Roman emperors were portrayed on horseback to emphasise their power and authority. This resulted in the Man on Horseback becoming the epitome of heroism and a symbol of the conqueror. Mokgosi’s interpretation stands as an opposite to these earlier renditions; the rider less proud and his horse not as noble, drawing an initial response of pity, rather than admiration. The drawing is meticulously built up with repetitive contoured pencil marks, achieving a sculptural monumentality, enhanced by the cropped composition. With his stick raised high, the rider drives his horse, its head reared in agony, into the ground. This embodiment of abuse and suffering is further accentuated by the horse’s malnourished body and disjointed limbs, the rider evidently too heavy for the exhausted animal to carry. Applying social realism in its exaggerated form, the artist thus portrays man’s indifference to the suffering caused by the abuse of power in a disrespectful and unbalanced society.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
EJ de Jager, Images of man: Contemporary South African Black art and artists , Alice, 1992, pp 163 - 165