About Thabiso Phepeng

Statement

My practice is grounded in line-making as a method of thinking rather than composing. Through accumulated lines, drips, strokes, splatters, and marks, I construct layered visual fields in which colour, rhythm, and density unfold over time. These surfaces resist immediacy and operate between observing and being observed, questioning position, distance, and the conditions that shape perception. I reject the idea of a neutral viewpoint; seeing is always situated.

Rather than offering a single perspective, the work is built through layering, interruption, and fragmentation. This prevents fixed readings and invites a durational encounter in which meaning emerges through movement, repetition, and sustained attention rather than resolution. Painting forms the foundation of my practice, which I approach as an open and expandable field. Line functions simultaneously as gesture and structure, mark and framework. Through abstraction, I use line to hold tension, allowing contradictions to coexist without closure. I am less interested in providing answers than in sustaining what remains open, unresolved, and active.

Thabiso Phepeng is a South African born, Zurich based artist. Born in 1981 and living in Zürich since 2014, his aesthetic is grounded in abstract art and has forged an inventive path to marry and collapse hierarchies between painting, graffiti, tradition, modernity, and the sublime. Traditional Sotho and Ndebele elements of wall painting are discernible in his work, yet he connects that with his grasp of forms, concepts, and experiments of the western canon. His own unique multicultural perspective guides his practice.

My practice is grounded in line-making as a method of thinking rather than composing.