In the Studio With Nkhensani Mkhari

On Colour, Soft Power, and Making Art at Home

Open City brought FNB Art Joburg out of the fair centre and into the working spaces of the city itself, and on the last day of August, that meant an afternoon at David Krut Workshop in Maboneng. Nkhensani Mkhari - a Johannesburg-based, post-disciplinary artist and curator whose practice moves between photography, painting, performance, sound, and print - was on the press, demonstrating monotype for a room of onlookers who wandered in and out asking their own questions in between his.

Mkhari’s relationship with the workshop goes back to 2024, when a series of minimal, colour-field paintings he showed with Church Gallery at the Johannesburg Art Fair caught David Krut’s eye. What followed was a slow apprenticeship into printmaking - first a single day at the press in September of that year, then a longer stint that winter working alongside printers Kim-Lee Loggenberg-Tim and Roxy Kaczmarek, and eventually a first solo exhibition with David Krut Projects, Mavonelo: Perspectives, in March 2025. By the time of Open City, he’d been printing for close to two years.

Nkhensani described himself as “an artist, curator - a curatorial technologist, really, if you want to get technical about it,” and spoke about his practice as fundamentally about storytelling - one built on an interest in “the human imagination and epistemological frameworks,” which he works at transposing “using the artistic medium.” The pieces he made that day, he said, were “inspired by my journey coming here to Johannesburg, and the colours and people I saw along the way” - an interplay he described as “the organic and the geometric,” balanced against each other to create what he calls a coincidental positorium: “when two opposing mediums or ideas come together to form something new.” Nkhensani’s work builds and plays with geometry, layers of colour, and the layers of texture that exist everywhere already.

He was also clear about wanting the human hand to stay visible in the work, especially now. Nkhensani spoke about the suspicion that surrounds images in the present moment, stating that “we live in an age where people are constantly suspicious of the image - of the responsibility we have towards an image and towards the people it represents.” He described his own process as additive as much as subtractive - “removing... adding gestures that show the human hand” - and named that presence as one of the things that matters most to him “in the age of AI,” which he said “can make anything look like surrealism.” Keeping the hand visible, for him, is “a regular pushing back.”

Abstraction sits close to the center of how he thinks. Nkhensani pushed back on the assumption that the form belongs to a particular place or decade, stating that while “a lot of people think it comes out of the 50s or 60s in America,” he sees it differently - “the more time passes, the more we realize it doesn’t particularly belong to anyone,” pointing to his own continent’s histories of abstraction as evidence. He described himself as pulling from many references and histories at once, “because I consider myself a global citizen.” That same instinct shaped what he wants from a viewer: he said he hopes to “leave that question open - give somebody a chance to see something they might not have a name for,” in contrast to the constant, concrete engagement of everyday life. “Everything is so concrete,” he said. “So I try to create space for that particular quality, of wonder.”

Scale, for Nkhensani, is also a deliberate choice. He explained that he tends to work small because his pieces are personal - “you know it’s personal, it has to do with my life, because of the scale” - while larger work, in his view, shifts toward “societal or universal issues, history, the expanded field.” It’s a question he returns to formally: who a piece is actually for.