FREE SHIPPING IN SA!! JOE MASEKO ORIGINAL PAINTING TITLED "PIMVILLE SHOPPING CENTRE AND MARKET" 1987

JOE MASEKO ORIGINAL PAINTING TITLED "PIMVILLE SHOPPING CENTRE AND MARKET" 1987

Soweto based artist, Joe Maseko, died in Johannesburg in May 2008 at the age of 71. Maseko is best known for his vibrant paintings of township scenes. Maseko was born in Soweto on 26 December 1936, he was forced to leave school in Std 1 (now grade 3) to help support his family. He became a delivery boy for a grocery shop and then an assistant window dresser for a clothing chain store. An early sign of his talent was a backdrop he painted for a shop window; it won third prize for the company in a competition. Maseko taught himself just about everything, from how to write and speak English  to drawing and painting, initially with water-colours on every bit of paper that came to hand. Drawing was his “main form of communication”, he said. He spent every spare minute at municipal libraries reading books about art. In 1959 art became his sole means of existence. The work that Maseko produced always seemed to sell. Over the past few years his works have fetched increasingly good prices. At a recent auction, Sotheby’s sold one of his paintings for about $4000. 

A self-taught artist with little formal schooling, Maseko began painting in 1959.  As such, his works are interesting not only because of their successful synthesis of naturalism and abstraction, but also because they precede the development of ‘township art’ as a stylistic idiom. Maseko depicts an open and disorderly space, so typical of ‘informal’ settements. It should be remembered that the ‘township’ landscape changed in the 1960s and 1970s from the more orderly configuration of the so-called built ‘locations’ of earlier periods, to a chaotic configuration of shack dwellings, largely because of the effects of forced removals.

Painting measures 76cm by 50cm. Acrylic on canvas and in very good condition.

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