MAIN PHOTO: ARTIST KAGISO PAT MAUTLOA

THE PiE TEAM looks inside Kagiso Patrick Mautloa’s seven-decade love letter to Johannesburg — and the Bag Factory that has sheltered his practice for over three decades

On any given weekday, the corner of Mahlathini Street hums with the same restless energy that has fed Kagiso Patrick Mautloa’s paintings for the better part of seven decades. Hawkers set out their wares. Women tend coal-fired braziers, the smell of roasting mielies drifting into the Bag Factory’s courtyard. Traders eke out a living from a few items balanced on a board at a busy intersection. It is a scene Mautloa has watched, absorbed and repainted more times than he could count — and this month, the studios he has called home for longer than any other resident artist are giving that lifelong conversation with the city its own solo stage.

Face(t)s of the City, which opened on 20 August and running until 19 September at Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in Newtown, is both a retrospective glance and a live experiment. Alongside a body of completed paintings, drawings, multimedia collages and sculpture, Mautloa — affectionately known around the building as Bra Pat — will spend the exhibition’s run at work on ambitious large-scale canvases inside the gallery itself, inviting the public to watch the city’s raw material become art in real time.

A Life Painted in Layers

Mautloa has been a Johannesburg resident since infancy, and the city’s physical and social textures run through everything he makes. He trained at the Rorke’s Drift Art Centre in KwaZulu-Natal and at the Mofolo Art Centre in Soweto, and came up through the influential Thupelo and Triangle workshops that shaped a generation of South African artists working outside the mainstream gallery system. Over the decades his practice has refused to sit still: drawings give way to heavily layered paintings, paintings give way to multimedia collage, and collage gives way to the sculptural, found-object works that have become something of a signature.

“I find inspiration from the inner city of Johannesburg, where found objects are collected both consciously and unconsciously,” Mautloa has said of his process. “In the studio, they are given new life through the transformative process of art-making.”

That transformation happens on unglamorous ground. Mautloa is drawn to the surfaces most of us walk past without noticing — the grain of a well-used cutting board, a cotton rag worn thin from labour — and finds in them a strange, insistent beauty. Delicate line work sits next to seemingly random spatter; abstraction and figuration trade places from one work to the next. It is, by design, a practice that resists tidy categorisation. Working mostly in oil and acrylic, he moves easily into found materials, installation and photography whenever the subject calls for it.

Where the Studio Ends and the City Begins

It is famously difficult to say where Mautloa’s studio stops and Johannesburg starts. He moves between the two constantly, carrying observations and objects across what amounts to an undefined threshold, and his well-inhabited studio at the Bag Factory has long since overflowed its own capacity — works and ephemera occupy every available inch. Face(t)s of the City leans directly into that porousness, deliberately bringing a slice of studio life into the exhibition space rather than presenting only finished, framed conclusions.

Each object Mautloa produces functions, in his own telling, like one facet of a gemstone held to the light: turn it slightly and another angle of the city’s layered story catches the eye. He is unsentimental about what that story contains — the labour that built Johannesburg, the restrictions historically placed on movement through it, and the precariousness of simply making a living within it are never far from view. Yet what comes through most strongly in his colour and his gesture, often shaped by the rhythms of music, is not despair but a stubborn, ordinary vitality: the insistence of the city’s people on living fully despite a prevailing narrative of hardship and decline.

35 Years of the Bag Factory

The exhibition also marks a milestone for its host. Bag Factory Artists’ Studios — known formally as Fordsburg Artists’ Studios — is celebrating 35 years as a non-profit contemporary visual art organisation in Newtown, and Mautloa’s show arrives as something close to an anniversary tribute. As the longest-standing artist still working from the building, he is, in the organisation’s own words, “an enduring source of inspiration and institutional memory to each generation of artists who pass through.”

The studios were established in 1991 as an artist-run community arts organisation, founded by cultural workers Koloane, Loder and Burnett and supported from the outset by a cohort of resident artists that included Mautloa alongside Sam Nhlengethwa, Thomas Nkuna, Joachim Schoenfeldt, Sophia Ainslie, Mark Attwood, Deborah Bell and Penny Siopis. More than three decades on, Bag Factory has provided subsidised studio space to over 120 resident artists and hosted more than 320 visiting artists from across South Africa, the continent and beyond, while its gallery continues to platform new work from emerging artists for a wider public.

Beyond studio space and exhibitions, Bag Factory runs a public programme built to widen understanding of contemporary visual art and to deepen interaction between artists, the local community and the broader cultural sector — including workshops, mentorship, and the prestigious David Koloane and Cassirer Welz awards. It is also affiliated with the international Triangle Network, linking Newtown’s artists into a wider global conversation. Face(t)s of the City is presented with the support of the National Arts Council.

Visit the Exhibition

Face(t)s of the City opened on 20 August to 19 September 2026 at Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, 10 Mahlathini Street, Newtown, Johannesburg. The gallery is open Monday to Friday, 10am to 4pm. The will be a Walkabout and Artist Talk with Mautloa on 12 September.

“Each object he creates, like the facets of a gemstone held up to the light, invites a closer look at the layered story of the city.”

For media enquiries, contact the Bag Factory Communications Department: nqobile natasia (they/them), office +27 (0)11 834 9181, email nqobile@bagfactoryart.org.za, or visit www.bagfactoryart.org.za.