Lucas Sithole South African, 1931-1994
Lucas Sithole is a well-known South African sculptor. He was born on 15 November 1931 to a Zulu Zionist priest and a Swazi mother in KwaThema in Springs, what is now Gauteng Province. As a child, Sithole attended St. Louis Catholic School. In 1948, he was awarded a bursary by the Rotary Club, which afforded him the opportunity to study at the Vlakfontein Technical College.
Sithole had wanted to study art, but because there was no art teacher at the college, he took up carpentry and welding. Many of the skills acquired during these years helped inform his sculpture. After leaving college, Sithole studied under legendary educator and artist Cecil Skotnes at the Polly Street Art Centre intermittently from 1955 to 1960, where he learned about painting and modelling in clay. He was originally trained in carpentry and cabinet making, but later decided to follow his life-long dream of being an artist, and began carving figures out of wood.
Sithole predominantly worked with indigenous wood, which he generally went and searched for in the wild, but also worked with a variety of other materials, such as stone, liquid steel, and bronze. He often used the shapes and forms of the materials he found as inspiration for his sculptures.
According to Skotnes, Sithole was greatly influenced by the attenuated proportions of Sydney Kumalo’s sculpture Praying Woman (1959). The rendering of his often extended forms of humans and animals (both real and supernatural) share the sense of fragility and anxiety of a disfigured society expressed by Giacometti. But Sithole’s work also expresses a sense of poetic and spiritual melancholy that is uniquely his own and was rarely rendered by other members of the Polly Street coeval.
Sithole’s work drew not only on African mythology and spirituality, much of which he gleaned from his grandmother, but on the personal and social. His intimate handling of both subject matter and material offers a deeply personal perspective on African modernist modalities. The proportions of his elongated forms were, in many senses, a 'synthesis'of 'African and Western traditions'.
In 1968, Sithole’s Tornado (Antediluvian Animal) (1968) was featured in the South African entry at the Venice Biennale. In 2024, his sculpture The Guitarist (1988) was chosen as part of Adriano Pedrosa’s ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ in the 60th International Art Exhibition at Venice.
Sithole died in 1994 in Pongola, he was married and had seven children. He is an important figure in South African Black Modernism, and is one of the earliest black sculptors to have gained serious recognition and celebrity in his own lifetime, within the confines of the apartheid regime. He exhibited frequently at Gallery 21 in Johannesburg in the late 1960s and 70s and his influence on subsequent generations of sculptors is profound, endorsing his legacy as one of the great fathers of South African Modernist sculpture.
