Exhibition of the tenth ABN AMRO Art Award winner Neo Matloga

Last year the tenth ABN AMRO Art Award was granted to Neo Matloga. As part of this prize, his exhibition, along came your eyes, has opened at the Hermitage Amsterdam. For this solo show Matloga produced a series of seven new works.

Using photographs, ink, and charcoal, Matloga creates 'collage-paintings' that open a window onto the world that surrounded him in South Africa. Each painting is titled in the artist's native language, a proud nod to his home province, Limpopo. The paintings serve as a recollection of scenes from his past. They are filled with emotions, coupled with imagined realities that blend the absurd and the surreal in an exchange of passion, conflict, and joy.

In his new body of work, Matloga's characters are seen lounging at the beach, in an intimate embrace in a swimming pool, or sharing a moment at a café. The characters look directly at the viewer, but their heads are consistently shown in profile, in what could be seen as a cue to racial profiling. In this way, Matloga takes the gaze of his characters ‒ and the viewer ‒ far beyond the canvas. The title of the exhibition, along came your eyes,echoes this poetic push and pull of the gaze.

Matloga is known for his rendering of Black joy, the everyday moments among Black people that are rarely shown in art and in the media. These seemingly mundane scenes are layered with sociopolitical undertones that allude to the many ways Blackness is seen and represented. However, a clear-cut message is nowhere to be found; the strength of Matloga's work lies in this open-ended nature of his collage-paintings. Matloga calls them "ugly-beautiful paintings". Beauty and distortion, at first seemingly conflicting forces, reach an unexpected balance. On display to the public from 17 May 2022 through 2 October 2022.

We just want to be closer, Singarum Moodley and Neo Matloga

Running concurrently with this exhibition, work by Matloga is also presented at the ABN AMRO Art Space in Amsterdam's Zuidas district, as part of the art award. Two South African artists of different generations present a multi-layered narrative about freedom and self-determination in the ABN AMRO Art Space.

Neo Matloga (1993) grew up in the period after Apartheid and with the hope of a democratic future. In his collaged paintings he creates scenarios and characters far from conventional concepts of identity and gender. The photographic studio of Singarum J. Moodley (1922 - 1987) was a place of refuge for the anti-Apartheid movement. Unlike the political photography of the resistance, his portraits from the 1970s/80s reflect yearning, pride, playfulness and defiance, which finds its contemporary continuation in Matloga's pictures between closeness and conflict. The colonial view gave rise to structures of differentiation whose artificiality is subtly but expressively exposed by Moodley and Matloga.

The exhibition, curated by Dr. Wiebke Hahn, was originally presented in Germany at the Marta Herford Museum from 24 October 2021 - 13 February 2022. A selection from that exhibition is now on view at the ABN AMRO Art Space. On view through 29 September 2022.

About Neo Matloga

Neo Matloga (Mamaila, South Africa, 1993) lives and works in Mamaila and Amsterdam. After studying visual art at the University of Johannesburg, he was a resident at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, from 2016 to 2018. In 2018 he was awarded the Koninklijke Prijs voor Vrije Schilderkunst (Royal Award for Modern Painting), and in 2019 was nominated for the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunstprijs. Matloga has had solo exhibitions at Stroom Den Haag (2021); S.M.A.K. (Vrienden van het S.M.A.K.), Ghent (2021); Stevenson, Capetown (2021); and at the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (2019), among others.

Jury Report

"Neo Matloga is recognized by the jury for his compositional acuity and his vibrant, powerful, and spirited work. It is both monumental and intimate, and in a singular manner deals with the dilem­mas of our age."See the full jury report on the

10th ABN AMRO Art Award

The ABN AMRO Art Award aims to stimulate talent in the Netherlands. The quality and the singularity of the artist's work are the main criteria for the prize. As part of the award Matloga has been granted a monetary sum of 10,000 euros and a solo exhibition at the Hermitage Amsterdam, including an accompanying publication designed by Irma Boom and containing an essay by Azu Nwagbogu; Matloga's work is also concurrently on view at the ABN AMRO Art Space in Amsterdam's Zuidas district. Furthermore, a purchase of Matloga's work will be made for the ABN AMRO Art Collection.

Also currently on display in Amsterdam: the Stichting NDSM-werf presents three of Neo Matloga's works on the NDSM billboards from the 12th of May to the end of July 2022.

Hans Sjouke Koopal