On the basis of the restless landscapes that she painted at night, largely inspired by her upbringing in the rural Eastern Cape, schoolteacher and self-styled “dreamer–imaginist” Gladys Mgudlandlu became the most prominent Black female visual artist in 1960s’ South Africa. Mgudlandlu’s portraits often depict women or girls of the Xhosa ethnic group, and usually in pairs. In place of the shadowy figures that typically accompany these subjects, however, a white haze suggests the cold against which the titular old ladies huddle and bend – and perhaps also what Mgudlandlu regarded as the “sacred and protective power of white” which, she told her biographer Elza Miles when recalling the Peddie homesteads of her childhood, she would apply to the frames of doors and windows. Notions of the sacred saturate this little-known, undated, and unusual work, whose broad shapes are suggestive of Mgudlandlu’s later style. The two women appear dressed in the uniform of what is likely a Zionist church. They are seen from the “bird’s-eye” view favoured by Mgudlandlu, who deeply identified with birds and whose portrayals of the creatures in harmonious pairs, such as in The Oystercatchers (1964), are evoked by the couple’s aesthetic symmetry and their arms’ concordant gesture.
This is the first time the work of Gladys Mgudlandlu is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
