LOT 26: Stephen Langa | Fixing her crown | 2021

Stephen Langa (b. 1995) is a South African Contemporary Artist from the Limpopo province. Langa currently lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Stephen practiced art at a very young age, from drawing cartoon characters to becoming a professional artist who specializes in different mediums such as charcoal drawing, watercolor, and oil paintings. He studied Art & Design at the Tshwane North College in Pretoria. Furthermore, he studied Printmaking at Artist Proof Studios (APS). His body of work explores diverse stories of black people and experiences of those around him and personal journey of life. His work is Inspired by the Impressionism art period from the 20th Century, he researches and explores ways to capture his emotions and fuel his artworks. Inspired by profound artist such as George Pemba, Claude Monet, Gerald Sekoto and Vincent Van Gogh, my charcoal lineworks and oil paintings have become pictorial visions that has a mesmerizing effect that is inspired directly by my emotive feelings that one can immediately identify and engage with the characters portrayed in such a way one would like to know them better in person. Langa`s work seeks to galvanize and has intimacy of black cultural experiences, compositions that have questions for the viewer and highlights of his own experiences of his hometown and the city as visual detailed in his journey, experiencing life in both worlds from moving to one place to another. There is a lot of intimacy when I?m engaging with my practice, and how I can evolve as an artist and myself