Johannesburg born abstract artist Pebofatso Mokoena’s solo exhibition The Insomnia of a Biscuit is currently on at First Floor gallery in Harare
The Insomnia of a Biscuit, is a title, like all of Mokoena’s titles, designed to shake the viewer out of an expectation of the ordinary, challenging the audience to make up their own mind.
By CityLife Arts Writer
Once a year or so, Pebofatso Mokoena gives art lovers and collectors a chance to step into his magical world of colour. This year is no different. Mokoena is positioning himself as the most serious and exciting abstractionist of his generation in Africa. Courageous, robust and unapologetic in his engagement with the paint, art history and belief in his personal vision, The Insomnia of a Biscuit, a solo exhibition, has just opened at First Floor Gallery in Harare, Zimbabwe. This is the next step in Mokoena’s roller-coaster journey towards self-actualisation, and you are invited to join the journey.
Painting is the most difficult job in the world. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Over and above the difficulty of being an artist – already a profession roughly equivalent to a free fall sometimes interpreted as flight, being a painter is analogous to doing that while being judged by absolutely everyone and knowing that you cannot do anything about it, contribute anything new to the field other than the minute hope of the uniqueness of being yourself.
This is what it feels like provided you are doing it right – Pebofatso Mokoena is and has been doing it right. To understand The Insomnia of a Biscuit one needs to begin at least, where the journey ended with his previous solo Scenographies of the Hologram (2025), an expansive conversation of the artist with his greatest historical masters/influences/heroes from Cezanne to Monet and Rothko and an accounting of a journey taken to arrive some place.
That some place is a place every artist aspires to reach – a space of ultimate agency. A place where one is genuinely standing on the shoulders of giants and seeing something new in way that is not possible for any painter other than them.
The Insomnia of a Biscuit, is a title, like all of Mokoena’s titles, designed to shake the viewer out of an expectation of the ordinary, challenging the audience to make up their own mind. This is because it is a body of work committed to agency with every brush stroke and agency for the artist that needs to be shared as an idea, feeling and paradigm with the audience. Asserting artistic agency has equal weighting for Mokoena with asserting personal agency as a human being and exploring and developing it in art runs in parallel with his life. In a world where we are too eager to employ the cliché of ‘art imitates life’, Mokoena posits that for an artist, making art is and should be a method of self-awareness, cognitive, emotional and spiritual evolution that can be shared if done with good faith, sincerity and humility. The Insomnia of a Biscuit is all of the above. Valerie Kabov
Born 1993, Johannesburg, South Africa. Lives and works, Johannesburg, South Africa In 2014, He completed his N.Dip (Visual Art) at the University of Johannesburg and subsequently, apart from working towards his BTech qualification, Pebofatso teaches drawing and presentation at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, at UJ. Emerging from early practice in printmaking, Mokoena’s painting practice is formally underscored by precise mark making and division of space, while exploring ideas around micro and macro scales of politics, architecture and the environment. Pebofatso’s work has received early recognition and support, locally and internationally. Mokoena has held two solo exhibitions – The Pebofatso Experience at HZRD and Inside Jobs at the Bag Factory as well as curated exhibitions including Diptych; Disclosure at SMAC; Fresh Produce 2014, Inner Nature, Fortunes Remixed, and South African Voices: A New Generation of Printmakers in Washington DC and is in the Springs Art Library Collection, the South African Embassy Art Collection (in Washington, D.C.), and the JP Morgan Global Collection amongst other private collections.
.The Insomnia of a Biscuit is currently up at First Floor Gallery, Harare, until 13 November. Gallery hours 10-5pm Monday to Friday and by appointment on weekends.