South African multidisciplinary artist Manyaku Mashilo has been selected for The Artsy Vanguard 2026, recognizing her as one of ten promising talents poised to become future leaders in contemporary art and culture. Working primarily in painting, Mashilo creates powerful compositions that blend traditional South African materials and cultural references with contemporary artistic techniques, drawing international attention since she committed to full-time art-making in 2020.
Red ocher holds profound significance for Mashilo, who grew up in South Africa's northwestern Limpopo province where the iron-rich clay covers the landscape. As a child, she would return home from outdoor play with her shoes and legs covered in the distinctive red color. The pigment also played a central role in the koma, a traditional coming-of-age ceremony for young Sepedi women, where the clay mixed with animal fat was applied to initiates' bodies before a period of seclusion and instruction led by community matriarchs. The ceremonial washing that followed, with red ochre rippling into the river, marked the girls' transition into womanhood.
Mashilo's life changed dramatically when she moved to the bustling city of Pretoria at age nine, before she could participate in the traditional initiation ceremony herself. "The move affected me a lot," she explained. "The transition from a rural environment to the hustle and bustle of the city introduced what the artist calls a duality that I have tried to balance within myself." This experience of displacement and cultural transition became a defining theme in her artistic practice, with dripping reds appearing throughout her canvases as symbols of home in a world of non-belonging.
Since leaving her gallery job in 2020 to pursue art full-time, Mashilo has gained international recognition through group exhibitions at prestigious venues including the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort, Netherlands, and Gagosian in London. Earlier this year, she held her first U.S. exhibition, "The Laying of Hands," at the Los Angeles space of Southern Guild, which has represented her since 2023. The gallery recently showcased her new work at Frieze London, with additional presentations planned for ART X Lagos.
Mashilo's artistic practice is deeply rooted in storytelling, a skill she developed as a survival mechanism while navigating different environments throughout her life, from Limpopo to Pretoria, Johannesburg, and currently Cape Town. "Over her lifetime, Mashilo got really good at storytelling as a way to survive," she noted. Her paintings focus on world-building and reimagining reality, which she describes as a healing process. Many of her figures wear ntepa (traditional skirts) around their waists, representing their ancestral lands, while others hold bright blue staffs referencing the lepara, prayer-charged objects gifted to family heads. A lepara hung in Mashilo's own childhood home.
The artist's technical process begins with laying canvas flat on the ground, pouring water over it, then adding ocher harvested from Limpopo caves and ink. The pigment's behavior depends on environmental factors like floor textures and daily weather conditions in her studio. "Elements make the painting," she explains. Occasionally, she incorporates imphepho, a plant endemic to South Africa used in traditional medicine and ancestral rituals, sprinkling it onto the underlayer before it dries.
Once the foundation is complete, Mashilo outlines figures in pencil and applies multiple layers of acrylic paint, creating rich, ruddy skin tones. She cites Caravaggio as a major influence, evident in the dramatic chiaroscuro contrasts that make her compositions particularly striking. Her paintings depict rituals connecting earth and spirit, dream-like memories, and otherworldly places, as seen in "Moving forward on and into eternity" (2020), an acrylic, metallic ink, and paper collage work featuring celestial landscapes populated by figures in white dresses typical of Zion Christian Church members, a sect to which many of her family members belong.
Her fashion design background, studied at the Vega School of Design in Pretoria, influences the detailed costumes in her work. While the fashion industry traditionally highlights white, thin, feminine bodies, Mashilo deliberately represents Black women who subvert conventional standards. In "Passage to Prayer" (2023), figures parade across a cosmological map with suspended ocher orbs resembling gaseous planets, while two central figures wear elaborate gowns of oxidized watercolor and blue linework, standing contemplatively within the composition.
Mashilo's figures serve as intimate character studies, whether drawn from archival imagery, family photographs, live models, or self-portraits. Though often rendered larger-than-life compared to their surroundings, their expressions remain familiar and accessible. In "We came unafraid and willing to stay" (2024), seven gathered figures could represent goddesses from another dimension, supermodels from a fashion editorial, or friends' photographs collaged on a bedroom wall. The artist views this practice as "ancestrally and spiritually building worlds," creating narratives where past communes with future, material with spiritual, and reality with imagination.
Recently, Mashilo has begun experimenting with oil paint alongside her traditional acrylics. "Oil requires me to slow down," she observed, allowing her to spend considerable time deepening and refining new works. These pieces are delicate studies of feminine form that feel more earthbound than her previous astrological compositions. With sandy backdrops, they echo rock paintings found in caves where ocher originates, while incorporating both modern and art historical sensibilities.
Her newest work draws inspiration from her recently deceased grandmother, "cemented by dreams that she is sending me." Her grandmother served as farmer, healer, and spiritual community leader. In her studio, Mashilo surrounds herself with ancestral spirits, listening to jazz musicians like Alice Coltrane while working beneath photographs of her mother, grandmother, and worshippers captured by legendary South African photographer Santu Mofokeng. Through her paintings, she imagines worlds where these spirits continue thriving, describing the process as "a ritual. And within it, a sort of healing." The Artsy Vanguard, now in its eighth year, continues highlighting the most promising contemporary artists as the art world looks toward 2026.
