Painting in Series: The Practice of Thabiso Phepeng
Thabiso Phepeng is a South African born, Zurich based artist working in abstract painting, drawing and mark making. This page describes how the work is made, how a series is structured, and what is available to collectors, curators and institutions.
One Idea, Carried to Its End
Every body of work begins as a single question about surface, weight or repetition, and the paintings in a series are the different answers that question allows. Nothing is finished early. A series closes when the idea has been exhausted, not when a wall has been filled, which is why the work is dated by sequence as much as by year and why works from the same series are shown together.
Scale and the Unclipped Edge
The paintings are made at architectural scale and are reproduced here complete, from edge to edge, without cropping. A detail can look convincing in isolation and still fail as a painting, so the full rectangle is what is offered for judgement: the balance of mass, the pacing of the marks, the places where the hand slows down. Viewing the works in this way is a condition of the practice rather than a preference.
Lineage and Mark Making
The vocabulary of marks comes out of Southern African wall painting, specifically the Sotho and Ndebele traditions in which a shared surface is built up through repeated, hand-drawn units. That inheritance meets drawing as a daily discipline and the openness of post-war abstraction, where a mark is never decoration but a decision with consequences for the field around it.
Materials and Making
Works are made in acrylic, pigment, charcoal and ink on canvas and paper, often in layers that are sanded, scraped and rebuilt over months. Drawing underpins the painting practice and is treated as finished work in its own right, not as preparation. Paper works are made in the same series as the canvases and follow the same rules of scale within their format.
Studio and Availability
The studio works from Zurich, with the practice rooted in South Africa. Works are available for acquisition, and commissions are considered where the brief can be met inside an existing series rather than as an imitation of one. Exhibitions, loans, studio visits and press requests are arranged directly, and a full checklist with dimensions and provenance is available on request.