PARIS.- Galerie Templon announced that it now represents Billie Zangewa in Europe.
Born in 1973 in Malawi, Billie Zangewa lives and works in Johannesburg.
She uses silk samples to create vibrant tapestries. Her figurative compositions are inspired by her personal experiences and her private life, chronicling the ordinary existence of a urban black woman.
When Zangewa went to Johannesburg in the 1990s, after graduating from Rhodes University, leaving the suburban Botswana world where she was brought up by her mother behind, she discovered urban life and a patriarchal society which looks down on the domestic tasks women are left to perform. Her professors encouraged her to politicise her message and distance herself from private and sentimental topics, seen as trivial. However, attracted by the fashion world where she spent several years working and after a chance encounter with a handful of samples, she decided to reappropriate silk and the long and slow process of sewing. Her goal was to gently but resolutely place her identity as a black woman at the heart of her artistic explorations. Behind the filter of private, daily life, her work subtly questions gender stereotypes and racial prejudice.
Billie Zangewa has been exhibiting her art in Botswana and South Africa since 1997 and internationally, to great acclaim, for around fifteen years. Her work has been showcased by a number of solo exhibitions, including in 2018 at Art Basel Miami Beach and in 2017 at the Frieze London and Art Paris. She has taken part in an array of group exhibitions in Africa, Europe and the USA, such as I am… Contemporary Women Artists of Africa, National Museum of African Art-Smithsonian Institute, Washington (2019), Making Africa: A Continent Of Contemporary Design, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2018), Stedelijk BASE, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2017), Women’s Work, Crafting Stories, Subverting Narratives, Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town and A Constellation, Studio Museum Harlem, New York (2016), and Body Talk: Feminism, Sexuality and the Body in the Work of Six African Women Artists, WIELS, Brussels (2015).
Billie Zangewa's work features in the collections at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and Tate in London.
Galerie Templon will be exhibiting her work at FIAC 2019 and organising a solo exhibition in Paris in March 2020.
