These are the complex narratives behind Thebe Phetogo paintings that won us over. But first it was obviously the nearly ever present vivid green in his paintings which demanded our attention. Thebe Phetogo’s work also required some thinking before being convinced – these are works that felt challenging. We first saw Thebe’s work when he took part in Guns and Rain Fresh Voices in 2020. There were a couple of works that were very tempting, a very neat quote of a Kerry James Marshall painting among them that in hindsight we should have pursued. His first solo Blackbody Composites at Kò a new gallery in Lagos, following a residency in the city that enabled us to get to know his practice more deeply. The Black Lives Matter debate raged in the US, and Blackbody composite (Conjoined Twins), which we acquired, felt very relevant. As we would later discover there was much more to the painting than we had first seen.
Phetogo’s practice ranges from figuration to landscape with many influences from video games to expressionist painting. Landscape elements are also important to his practice, referring more mythical places than actual ones. This was to us another innovative aspect in his paintings. After all, not many African contemporary artists are invested in working on landscapes (outside of photography). Thebe’s second solo show, with Guns and Rain this time, Ko Ga Lowe, offered us the opportunity to acquire Cave Rock Opera, an elegiac depiction of a mountain, not unlike Alexander von Humboldt’s maps.
A stroke of luck, or perhaps a sign of providence, Thebe soon started working with a young ultra-contemporary gallery in Washington DC, Von Ammon Co. and has held two successful solo show with them since, including most recently 8 Propositions for the Origin of a blackbody as well as a group show Focus Group 4. This is on the occasion of the latter that his practice surprised once more, with a delightfully weird… pink… painting, Prelude to the Uncanny Valley I.
