Lulama Wolf is a visual artist who lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. At the intersection of Neo-Expressionism and contemporary African Art, Wolf interrogates the pre-colonial African experience by using smearing, scraping, and deep pigment techniques that were once used in traditional architecture. Inspired by the patterns created largely by women to decorate their homes, the dreamy earth tones of her pigments give her abstract interpretations of human figures a timeless appeal. Playing with intuition and formlessness, the people-like figures are contorted into different positions, compositions she says are inspired by the imagery of human evolution. Wolf says her work is inspired by a technique used in rock art (such as cave drawings) to pay homage to the “art that has come before”. Principle themes in Mlambo's work are history and spirituality while she explores the human condition in imaginative ways from a contemporary South African perspective. “I always want to dial down on explaining what my work means, allowing myself and whoever views it the liberty to properly experience it,” Lulama once said.
“My work carries my spirit, before it carries a message. My intuition plays a vital role in the direction I go and then I compartmentalize with what I prioritize. I represent different parts of myself including abstraction, curiosity, mythology, spirituality and introspection. Blackness is vital in my work because it is created by a black woman despite the medium or language it speaks, it is vital because proof of existence is rare in the black community, information is shared but isn’t sustained in ways that are knowledgeable to us right now. I express my yearning for answers and clarity in ways that make my blackness clear even when the work is abstract. My practice embodies subtlety in a form of texture and expression, a curious mix of ambiguity and curiosity. I experiment with different textures and mold that are formed from the earth.”
Mixing an eclectic range of influences and having a clear sense of what she wants to achieve going forward, Wolf is pushing the aesthetic of South African art to an interesting place. The emerging visual artist has participated in a string of group exhibitions since 2019 in her home country and shortly after in Europe and the United States. She is represented by THK gallery in South Africa. Her work has caught the attention of not only collectors, as she was asked to design a range of homeware for H&M worldwide in 2023.