Birthday Month
For this month’s pop up exhibition, we celebrate our birthday month by focusing on some notable artworks from the Standard Bank Corporate Collection. The works selected have a significant connection to the bank’s history and legacy in promoting the arts and profiling its valuable asset of artworks displayed through out the building.
Louis Maqhubela
South African modernist artist Maqhubela was a member of Durant Sihlali’s weekend artists group and studied under Cecil Skotnes and Sydney Kumalo at the Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg while still at school. He worked as a commercial artist and created paintings and mosaics in hospitals, schools, halls and public buildings in and around Soweto. Maqhubela lived in London and died in 2021.
First work by a Black artist to be officially purchased by the bank for the Standard Bank Corporate Art. Maqhubela did not only create a bridge for South Africa’s urban black ‘township artists’ of the 1950s , 60s and 70s, his move that offered away from prescriptive expressionism and into internationalist styles and concerns can hardly be overestimated.
Marco Cianfanelli
Well-known for his bold, innovative public art pieces and large-scale sculptural works, Marco Cianfanelli graduated with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1992. His most iconic work is Release, a monumental, fragmented portrait of Nelson Mandela that was erected in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands on the 50th anniversary of Mandela’s arrest there in 1962.
A site specific work created alongside the building of the Standard Bank of South Africa Limited headquarters in Rosebank Johannesburg. The work was structurally created to enhance the bank’s reception foyer. The Seed installation explores the Bank’s relationship with this continent, its people and its land. Measuring 34.33 metres high, 9.58 metres wide, and 8.55 metres in depth, Seed makes reference to Standard Bank’s position as a leading African bank. Playing on the metaphor of the seed in its representation of Africa, it’s potential, it’s history and it’s future, Seed is intended to evoke a continent abundant in resources and cultural heritage, rich histories of origin, migration, engagement and trade, alongside troubled histories of conflict and colonisation.
