Phillemon Hlungwani has built his career on a single, unglamorous subject: the small rural village in South Africa’s Limpopo Province where he grew up. It’s not a distinctive place by any obvious measure — one of countless similar villages scattered across the province — but for Hlungwani, one of South Africa’s most accomplished contemporary artists, it functions as both muse and refuge, a place he keeps returning to whenever his work needs renewing.
His new body of work, Amukela Leswi u Nga Nyikiwa Swona (“Accept what you have been given”), continues in the large-scale charcoal drawings he’s known for — images built entirely in grayscale that somehow still carry the full warmth of the communities they depict. The subjects will feel immediately familiar: barefoot children, village matriarchs wrapped in blankets, young mothers balancing loads on their heads with an ease that looks almost effortless. Several works center on the informal gatherings that hold rural communities together — people sitting with each other’s troubles as much as their celebrations, working through problems collectively rather than alone.
Hlungwani titles his pieces using proverbs in his native Xitsonga, each one distilling a piece of moral wisdom about how communities sustain their own values over time. Running underneath all of it is a quiet insistence that even the poorest people he depicts live full, complicated inner lives — with the same dreams, disappointments, love, and grief as anyone else. It’s this insistence on shared humanity, delivered without sentimentality, that gives the work its weight: Hlungwani isn’t asking viewers to pity his subjects, but to recognize themselves in them.
Everard Read London, September 11 – October 5, 2026