Shaun Motsi, born 1989 in Harare, ZWE, studied Fine Art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main until 2020. He won the Sammlung Pohl Graduate Prize in 2020 as well as the Städelschule’s Colliers International Rundgang Prize. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at such venues as Elvira, Frankfurt am Main, DE (2021), Shedhalle, Zurich, CH (2020), Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, DE (2020), PS120, Berlin, DE (2019), TOR Art Space, Frankfurt am Main, DE (2018), and the IX Berlin Biennale, Berlin, DE (2016). He has had solo exhibitions at Page NYC, New York, USA (2019) and PSM, Berlin, DE (2017), among others.
Using painting, installation, and text, Shaun Motsi examines various aspects of cultural narratives and how they interconnect in a global context. His works focus on the question of how knowledge and information are transmitted and received across temporal and geographical spaces. They reference everyday things, western pop culture, and the artist’s own experiences. Questions about the representation of blackness in relation to neoliberal-capitalist western culture play a role in his artistic practice, as does the blurring of the boundary between identity and aesthetics qua representation.
