Thabiso Phepeng

25.04.2026 – 30.05.2026

Thabiso Phepeng is a South African artist living in Zurich, whose work blends African artistic traditions, abstract expressionism, hip hop, and graffiti art. Born in 1981, he started painting and drawing in Thaba-Nchu, a small township town in the former landlocked Country of Bophuthatswana (disbanded in 1994) at the Mmabana Arts and Cultural Centre. In 1999 he went on to study a Fine Art (NDip) in Tshwane University of Technology (Pretoria, South Africa).
Exhibitions in Zurich, Basel, Andermatt, Capetown, Pretoria and Bloemfontein.

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 is discernible in his work, yet it never becomes obsessive for he is able to connect that with his grasp of forms, concepts, and experiments of the western canon. His own unique multicultural perspective guides his art practice.

„The series ‚Entitled boards‘ uses skateboard decks as a surface to contain and preserve fragments of history. Working with mixed media, I combine archival imagery, references to African cultural attire, and elements of popular culture with abstract line work, layering and mark-making.
The decks function as carriers of memory where histories are not fixed but reworked, interrupted and reassembled. Through this process, I explore how identity and culture are constructed, circulated and transformed over time.
My practice is driven by a need to hold and question these fragments creating spaces where personal, cultural and visual histories coexist in tension.“