“For me, art can only be founded on the single notion – of which it is both the confirmation and the proof – that Man is One,” Ernest Mancoba (1904-2002) said in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist.¹ Born in South Africa, Mancoba was a pioneer of avant-garde gestural movements and a father of African modernism, recognized for his playful gestural marks and abstract compositions. His early career was riddled by controversy, after he was both celebrated and derided for his work Bantu Madonna (1928), a sculpture of the Virgin Mary with African phenotypes rendered in traditional African yellowwood. Facing the limitations of Apartheid South Africa, Mancoba fled to Europe in 1938. However, he soon found himself arrested by the Nazis in Paris, and was placed in a German prisoner war camp. Once released two years later, he began to experiment with painting.

In 1940, he created Composition, in which he takes a word from European formalism and creates from it a gestural representation of an African mask. This painting marked his departure from figuration, one that would birth decades of experimentation and innovation with line, f igure, and form. His canvases featured rhythmic compositions and spontaneous, expressive forms that reflected his refusal to fit neatly into a definition of an African artist, particularly at a time when European and South African artists and curators were openly naming the South African movements of the mid-twentieth century “African Primitivism,” despite the movement’s clear engagement with modernism.

Aiming to form a more independent identity, Mancoba established himself as an avant-garde abstractionist, engaging with multiple artistic movements throughout the 20th century, while mostly being overlooked as a leader of them. Often the only African artist in the collectives he was part of, Mancoba was determined to establish his own personal freedom and unique identity – not just as an African artist, but as an avant-garde artist in Europe. Championing a style in which gestural marks are spread playfully across bare linen canvases, Mancoba resisted identifiable figures and forms, yearning instead to create a body of work that reflected a longing for “the thing that goes beyond us and which we do not understand,” as he noted in a 1995 interview. His paintings, like many of his travels, reflected a deeply aspirational relationship with his own self-definition. Mancoba’s art was at once universal and deeply personal – it was a declaration of the South African artist’s own personal intellectual freedom and identity.