• 'Puppets With Sexual Tendencies', Framed 183 x 300 x 7 cm

    "Puppets With Sexual Tendencies"

    Framed 183 x 300 x 7 cm

    In Puppets with Sexual Tendencies, Blessing Ngobeni presents figures suspended between animation and restraint. The puppets suggest bodies that are acted upon yet insist on their own impulses, where sexuality emerges not as performance but as instinct. Desire here feels unruly, awkward and unresolved, resisting neat moral or symbolic closure.

    Rather than offering a fixed narrative, the work stages a tension between control and surrender. The puppet becomes a site where power is negotiated through gesture, posture and proximity. Sexuality is not sensationalised but exposed as something deeply human, confused, vulnerable and often shaped by external forces.

     

    Ngobeni allows the viewer to sit with discomfort and curiosity. Meaning remains deliberately unstable, shifting with each encounter. What is animated, what is manipulated and what is desired are left open, reminding us that bodies are rarely singular in intention and never entirely autonomous.

  • 'Sleepiest', 2016, Mixed media on canvas framed 180 x 117 x 7 cm

    "Sleepiest", 2016

    Mixed media on canvas framed 180 x 117 x 7 cm

    Blesing Ngobeni’s works from 2016 and 2017 emerge from a period marked by profound personal struggle, vulnerability, and survival. Created at a time when the artist was navigating deep psychological and emotional turmoil, these early works are not simply aesthetic expressions but acts of endurance. They bear witness to a young artist wrestling with displacement, instability, and the quiet weight of existing on the margins, while searching for meaning and self worth in a world that offered little certainty.

     

    Drawing became a form of refuge and resistance. In moments where language failed and structure collapsed, art became Ngobeni’s anchor. Through obsessive mark making, layered surfaces, and raw figuration, he constructed a visual language that allowed him to process pain without needing to resolve it. These works do not offer neat narratives or resolutions. Instead, they sit honestly within confusion, repetition, and emotional excess, reflecting the lived reality of survival rather than the fantasy of recovery.

     

  • Level of Complicity II, 2016, frame 225 x 177 x 7 cm

    Level of Complicity II, 2016

    frame 225 x 177 x 7 cm

    The figures that populate these works appear strained, fragmented, or suspended in uneasy states of becoming. They speak to isolation but also persistence. There is an urgency in their presence, a refusal to disappear. Ngobeni’s practice during this time was less about refinement and more about necessity. To make was to remain alive. Each drawing functioned as proof of existence, a daily act of choosing to stay.

     

    Art did not save Ngobeni by offering escape. It saved him by offering structure, discipline, and a space where pain could be held rather than denied. The studio became a site of self reconstruction, where trauma could be externalized and transformed into something communicable. In this way, these early works form the foundation of Ngobeni’s broader practice, establishing art not as a career first, but as a lifeline.

     

    Viewed today, these works carry the weight of their origins. They remind us that creativity is often born not from comfort, but from necessity. They stand as testament to the quiet power of making as an act of survival, and to the resilience of an artist who found his voice by first learning how to stay.