State of reality

Dion Cupido’s latest solo exhibition opens on Thursday 4 May at the WORLDART gallery in Cape Town.

Cupido is considered by many to be one of the most important black portrait artists of his generation. He grew up in the notorious Mitchells Plain suburb of Cape Town where street art was his first introduction to art. As a teenager and young adult he attended community art projects and developed visual language with a strong reference to hip hop culture and the realty of living in a place where gangsterism and other social ills are part of daily life.

Titled State of reality, his exhibition explores the notion of reality and perceptions of that reality. One person’s dangerous ghetto is another person’s place of safety. How does my reality compare with our reality, and ultimately; can reality even exist outside of ourselves? These questions are contained in urban scenes and portraits in which the fragile and the charged interweave to present viewers with potentially different experience based on their personal realities.

The exhibition takes place at WORLDART, 54 Church Street, Cape Town cbd and will run from 4 – 26 May 2023.

Dion Cupido (b. 1973) is largely self-taught and has come a long way from being a teenager doing graffiti on walls in the Cape Flats to the respected artist that he is today. He discovered his ability to paint in 1990 while helping a friend with a school project. His first paintings were exhibited in 1998. In 2003 he joined the Arts & Media Access Centre's (AMAC) professional development program, where he won the Truworths AMAC Academy of the Visual Arts award.

By 2013, ArtSouthAfrica, South Africa’s most influential and widely read arts magazine, nominated him as a Bright Young Thing.

Writer and art historian Ashraf Jamal recently observed that Cupido “represents the very newly minted post-transitional moment in SA art; a moment in which our dark history and its democratic afterglow are both beside the point.” Cupido lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.