Meleko Mokgosi

Wingate Studio is pleased to announce a new edition by Meleko Mokgosi. Lover’s Discourse II, 2025, is a seven-plate aquatint etching created using a combination of the intaglio processes soft ground, hard ground, drypoint, and burnishing on large copper plates. Mokgosi’s large-scale, figurative works engage the history of painting and cinematic tropes to uncover notions of colonialism, democracy, and liberation across African history. Measuring 47 x 77 inches, this is Wingate Studio’s largest print to date. 

Taking the practice of lounge photography (pioneered in 1950s South African by photographers such as Ronald Ngilima) and African studio photography, this work examines the role that representation plays in how people work towards self-determination. In these photographic practices, the lounge for example became both an aspirational and confessional space, describing a space of one’s possessions and place in the community, therefore allowing the sitter the kind of aesthetic, cultural, and conceptual space necessary for them to be seen or recognized on their own terms – all of which were violently denied by systemic racism in 1950s South Africa. Likewise, in portraits from the photographic studio, subjects for the most part presented themselves the way they wished to be seen, including posing with various kinds of backdrops that contextualized their aesthetic aims. In this project, a contemporary couple, getting ready for prom, poses in front of a backdrop of another couple (rendered through hardground etching). Both couples are aware not only of the viewer but also aware of how and why they are being interpellated into image form. The lovebird, genus Agapornis, is a parrot species indigenous to the African continent, well-known for being colourful and having exceptionally strong social bonds (they are believed to be monogamous).

Wingate Studio

Spring 2025

In the studio

About the artist

Meleko Mokgosi (born in Francistown, Botswana; lives and works in Wellesley, MA) is an artist, Associate Professor and co-director of graduate studies at the Yale School of Art, and the co-director of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program.

His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, recently at Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Other venues include the Botswana National Gallery, Gaborone, Botswana; The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art Museum, Peekskill, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center, Los Angeles, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, France. His work is included in public collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art for Rollins College, Winter Park, FL; and Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME. Within the last half decade, Mokgosi had solo exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO; The Current, Stowe, VT; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Rochester Contemporary Art Center, NY; and University of Rochester’s Memorial Art Gallery, NY.

His most recent work is being featured in Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home in New Orleans. His work was on view at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, LA.