Vuyo Mfokazi is an Eastern Cape based artist (b. 1991, Mount Ayliff, Eastern Cape, South Africa), and is currently living in Johannesburg. Mfokazi’s work celebrates curiosity, intuition, and the joy of making. From childhood, Vuyo was drawn to creating, building wire cars, shaping clay cows by the river, repairing radios, sewing clothes, and writing poems and songs. Music came next, and with his first guitar, he began a lifelong journey of expression that eventually led him to painting.

In 2016, while attending the Imbali Visual Literacy Project in Johannesburg, Vuyo discovered his true calling as a painter. Guided by spontaneity, intuition, and improvisation, each work becomes a living record of how he experiences life, freedom, and connection. Inspired by the intuitive energy of artists like Pollock, Miró, Picasso, and Dubuffet, Vuyo’s work responds to the call of African spirituality, embracing deconstructed beauty and the core of humanity, not the face of humanity. His practice merges contemporary African aesthetics with abstract and Cubist influences, guided by spontaneity, intuition, and improvisation to create a visual language uniquely his own.

Through fragmented forms, vivid colours, and layered patterns, his work explores memory, spirituality, identity, the pursuit of freedom, and the complexity of the human experience, while also leaving space for the viewer to find their own stories within the work. Each piece becomes a dialogue, a bridge between personal history and collective memory, a celebration of resilience, and a reminder of the connections that bind us.

Vuyo’s art has been shown in solo exhibitions like Value Lives Here (2019, Indawo Gallery, Cape Town) and in group exhibitions such as the Gathering: A Community of Portraits (2020, Jeffer Modern Gallery). His works are held in collections such as the British Consulate in Cape Town and the University of Connecticut, USA, carrying the energy, curiosity, and freedom that define his practice.