Playing

A watercolour and charcoal (1981) work titled, Playing created by the South African artist Welcome Mandla Koboka (1941-1997). Although not well-known during his lifetime, he was a pioneer for Modernist art in South Africa. The artist's works document the daily life of people in townships and cities in South Africa. The work, Playing depicts a boy with a toy car and a woman watching him play. The painted strokes made deliberately by the artist create a sense of movement and one can feel the freedom and excitement of the boy in this scene. Koboka is best-known for his figures and paintings depicting everyday township life, some critics refer to his work as 'township art'. His subject matter is always depicted as elegant but simplified. Koboka worked in various mediums such as oil, watercolour, pencil and charcoal, painting was his preferred medium. Koboka developed a palette knife technique with his paintings, creating a gritty, weighted surface appearance that reviewers can easily notice. Koboka was born in 1941 in Johannesburg and was a student of the Polly Street Art Centre during the 1950s. In 1961, in his twenties he studied at the Jubilee Centre in Johannesburg under notable South African artists such as Cecil Skotnes and Ephraim Ngatane. Koboka participated in numerous group exhibitions from 1964 as well as solo exhibitions. In 1981, the ‘Black Art Today Exhibition’ was held in Soweto, and included his work, as did exhibitions in Austria and the United States. In later years, he became a teacher at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) established in 1978 in Orlando, Soweto. Koboka passed away in 1997. Several private collections as well as public collections hold his artworks, among them the University of Pretoria and the University of Fort Hare.