Lucas Sithole, regarded as one of South Africa’s foremost sculptors, is best known for his distinctive, semi-abstract depictions of animals, people, and Swazi and Zulu mythological beings carved from dead trees that the artist searched for himself. One among a number of his renderings of musicians, The Guitarist (1988) is recognisable as the work of Sithole by its profile and complex, extended form, exemplifying the use of proportion acclaimed by fellow sculptor Sydney Kumalo as a “synthesis” of “African and Western traditions”. Gracefully elongated, evocatively tilting, yet with an emaciated, snake-like character, the distorted figure invokes striking contrasts. The wood’s solidity is troubled by the articulation of negative space, and a play of light and shadow conjured by the textural juxtaposition of rough, pitted surfaces common to Sithole’s early work. Likened by Sithole to a longing for the divine, his favoured attenuated shapes and slender, writhing spirals appear as though revealed in the grains and long fibres of the indigenous woods that he preferred to other materials he worked in: stone, clay, bronze, and steel. In 1968, Sithole’s Tornado (Antediluvian Animal) (1968) was featured in the South African entry at the Biennale Arte.
—Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
