Lucas Bambo

Artist Lucas Bambo (b.1964) developed his skills and style as a child in Bloedfontein, Mpumalanga, South Africa. Moving to Pretoria as a young adult, he launched his career by selling his works outside an art supply store and at two craft markets. From the early 1980s, he worked as a self-employed artist and participated in South African group exhibitions. In 1989, after taking a printmaking course at Soweto’s Federated Union of Black Artists Academy (FUBA), he chose linocut printmaking as his primary medium. (FUBA offered arts education to black artists at a time when they were denied access to South African university arts programs.)

In the 1990s, Bambo relocated to the studio of printmaker Mimi van der Merwe in Pretoria, where he had access to materials and a printing press for his linocuts’ production. He also attended her printmaking classes, initiating a thirty-year professional relationship that included a joint exhibition in Scandinavia.

Bambo has exhibited in the USA (1998), France (1999), Mexico and Scotland (2005) and regularly appears in the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown. His art has received several awards in South Africa and remains part of several public and private collections, locally and abroad.

Documenting Africans’ socio-economic, political, and everyday life situations is his passion and mission. With regard to his general approach, he describes the pleasure he gets from studying the interaction of people and of animals, and of depicting what he sees on paper. His goal is to portray and teach others about his country: “to paint about its goodness.” While for the most part printing in black ink, he occasionally uses color.

In 2019, Bambo travelled to Zimbabwe to meet Cosmas Magaya and his family. For a week, he observed music in the daily life of their village, and attended an ancestral ceremony. The sketches he made during his visit became the basis for the prints that appear in A Prodigy’s Calling. They and other mbira prints of his are available through Julia Meintjes Fine Art.