Blessing Ngobeni

Untitled Excursion Series

This showcase presents final works from Ngobeni’s latest Excursion series of etchings and pronto-lithographs, alongside selected process materials that illuminate the artist’s first body of work in intaglio printmaking. The works produced in collaboration with Sbongiseni Khulu at the David Krut Workshop, demonstrate the fluid relationship between the artist’s performative mark-making and DKW’s technical expertise, weaving movement, rhythm, and visual sound into a powerful print series. The final works not only translate Blessing’s painterly gestures into copper and ink, but also extend his ongoing exploration of African expression, rhythm, and interconnectedness through body and sound.

“In Tears of Melody, the printing plate mating with a paper becomes a stage where sorrow and beauty perform side by side. It is the sound of pain that found rhythm, a cry that refused to die in silence. The work speaks to the paradox of creation: that even anguish can compose a song when filtered through the print maker as artist’s hand.

The “tears” represent more than sadness; they are the liquid memory of struggle, of a people, of an individual confronting the weight of existence. They carry stories unsung, fragments of memory, injustice, and resilience. Yet, as they fall, they form melody, a harmony of chaos, where grief becomes art, and pain transforms into rhythm and colour.”

TEARS OF MELODY, 2025

Pronto lithography

Edition of 9

36 x 49.5 cm

R 17 000.00 VAT Incl. Unframed

R 19 200.00 VAT Incl. Framed

“In this piece, emotion is not simply expressed but orchestrated. The etching movement plays like a musician’s bow, translating each emotional note into form, suggestive drips, scratches, bursts of light, and layered textures. The image was adopted from the original painting that is colourful and gold leaf may shimmer through, as if to suggest that within every tear lies a hidden brilliance, a quiet triumph of the human spirit.

TEARS OF MELODY II, 2025

Soft-ground and aquatint etching

Edition of 9

43.4 x 37 cm

R 15 000.00 VAT Incl. Unframed

R 17 000.00 VAT Incl. Framed

TEARS OF MELODY III, 2025

Hard-ground and aquatint etching

Edition of 9

43.4 x 37 cm

R 15 000.00 VAT Incl. Unframed

R 17 000.00 VAT Incl. Framed

Tears of Melody is not about sadness alone; it is about transcendence. It’s the story of how suffering sings — how brokenness, when reimagined through art, becomes a universal song of endurance and renewal.”

SELFISH NUDE I, 2025

Soft-ground and spit-bite etching with drypoint

Edition of 9

43.4 x 37 cm

R 15 000.00 VAT Incl. Unframed

R 17 000.00 VAT Incl. Framed

“In Selfish Nude, the body is not a symbol of beauty, it is a confession.

This work strips away the polite performances of identity to expose the raw, uncomfortable intimacy between the self and its desires. It’s not the nudity of flesh that I’m interested in, but the nudity of the mind, the layers we shed when we are alone with our thoughts, our fears, our hunger to be seen.”

“The figure in Selfish Nude carries no shame, yet no glory either. It floats between self-acceptance and self-obsession. In this space, vulnerability becomes power, and power becomes loneliness. The gold leaf traces across the skin like memory, shining, fragile, seductive, reminding us how we decorate our pain to make it acceptable.

Society has taught us to hide behind clothing, not only of fabric but of roles: artist, citizen, lover, survivor. Here, those layers fall away. What remains is the naked ego, the self that claims space without apology, the self that chooses itself first.”

SELFISH NUDE II, 2025

Hard-ground, spit-bite and aquatint etching

Edition of 9

43.4 x 37 cm

R 15 000.00 VAT Incl. Unframed

R 17 000.00 VAT Incl. Framed

“But Selfish Nude is not about arrogance. It’s about confrontation. It’s about seeing what is left when all performance is gone. What does it mean to be selfish enough to be honest?”

“Every day writes its own note on the skin of existence. Some in rhythm, others in rupture. This work listens to the sound between those notes the pauses, the whispers, the forgotten melodies that live beneath the noise of survival. In Life’s Notes, the canvas becomes a page of memory and resistance. Each mark, each stroke, carries a vibration of lived experience a song composed by the pressure of the world and the endurance of the human spirit.”

LIFE’S NOTE I, 2025

Soft-ground and aquatint etching with drypoint

Edition of 9

43.4 x 37 cm

R 15 000.00 VAT Incl. Unframed

R 17 000.00 VAT Incl. Framed

LIFE’S NOTE II, 2025

Hard-ground and aquatint etching

Edition of 9

43.4 x 37 cm

R 15 000.00 VAT Incl. Unframed

R 17 000.00 VAT Incl. Framed

“The figures, fragmented yet present, echo the improvisation of life itself: we play what we have, not always what we choose. The work speaks to the idea that life is not written in harmony, but in overlapping layers of joy, struggle, loss, and rebirth. It’s a visual score, chaotic but honest, where colours behave like instruments, each one trying to find its voice in the orchestra of existence. The artist becomes a conductor of time, weaving the gold of memory with the darkness of reality, transforming the unfinished symphony of human experience into something that feels eternal. The Spirit of the water dancing still appears as it guides the artists creative process and help with regeneration of strength towards challenging the status quo’s future.”

HEALING NOTES, 2025
Pronto lithography

Edition of 9
49.5 x 36 cm

R 17 000.00 VAT Incl. Unframed

R 19 200.00 VAT Incl. Framed

“Healing does not arrive with silence. It hums quietly through the cracks of our pain, finding rhythm in the spaces where words fail. In my work, I’ve learned that healing is not an act of erasure, it’s an act of composition. It’s like taking fragments of sound, colour, memory, and emotion, and allowing them to speak together until they form something new: a note of becoming. 

 

When I paint, I listen. Not only to music, but to the invisible frequencies that surround human experience, the vibrations of joy, of trauma, of survival. Each brushstroke is a sound wave, each colour a tone, each layer a kind of echo. Together, they build a language that doesn’t need translation. This is what I call Healing Notes, the art of transforming pain into rhythm, chaos into song. 

 

In the studio, healing feels like improvisation. You don’t always know which chord will resolve the dissonance. You simply keep moving through the noise until a moment of clarity appears, a gold light breaking through the surface. My process has always been about that pressure, that constant negotiation between darkness and illumination.

 

We all carry our own symphonies of scars and hopes. Some are louder than others. Some are still tuning themselves. Art becomes the space where those inner sounds find release, where we can hear ourselves again. To create is to heal, but also to witness: to see what the world tries to silence, and to remind it that even in pain, beauty insists on being heard.

 

 Healing Notes is a reminder that the heart, like art, is an instrument of survival. We may not control the melody life gives us, but we can still choose how to play it.  “

THOUGHT I, 2026

Oil-based reductive monotype

48.5 x 36.3 cm

R 43 450.00 VAT Incl. Framed

THOUGHT II, 2026

Oil-based reductive monotype

48.5 x 36.3 cm

R 43 450.00 VAT Incl. Framed

LAYERED SCENE, 2026

Oil-based reductive monotype with hand coloured chine collé

66 x 79.5 cm

R 48 450.00 VAT Incl. Framed

Blessing Ngobeni (b. 1985) is a South African multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, collage, sculpture, video animation, sound installations, and live performances. He creates abstract works of art with a variety of different objects. His artworks are a commentary on themes such as self-enrichment and the abuse of power. Ngobeni draws upon his own experiences and community struggles, creating large-scale paintings brimming with symbolism and narrative depth, through which he condemns the government’s failures to fulfil post-Apartheid promises of equality.

The project began in a sunlit studio at Ellis House, Johannesburg, where master printer Sbongiseni Khulu and Jesse Shepstone met with Blessing Ngobeni to discuss how printmaking could translate his gestural, music-inspired drawings into a tangible form. Soft-ground and hard-ground etching, alongside pronto lithography, became the instruments through which his painterly language could dance on copper and paper.

Blessing had been investigating the spontaneous spirit of jazz in large-scale paintings at the time (June 2025), noting how African dancers reacted to rhythm in various cultural contexts. His goal was to depict movement as music, using the body as a living instrument to convey cultural and historical themes. The gesture, the line, and the improvisational moment remained Blessing’s core, through Khulu’s supplied technical advice and resources. READ MORE

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