Terence Maluleke is a South African artist known for his vivid, geometric portrayals of Black life in and around his township in Johannesburg. I join Terence shortly before the opening of his next solo exhibition, Like a Fish in the Water, at Southern Guild Gallery here in Los Angeles.

The space is in motion, handlers and preparators moving about, repainting the minutiae, and Maluleke’s arrival signals everything settling into place. The gallery stills as we take a moment to gather ourselves, and then Maluleke introduces me to his world. In “Walls Fall Apart” (2024), he starts the conversation on topics at the forefront of his mind—why they came, and why they came now. “This idea that I’m exploring feels like much more of a coming-of-age narrative where I’m trying to confront what type of person I’m becoming,” he explains. And that he is—glancing around the gallery, Maluleke is making sense of the human condition. Lining the walls we see death scenes, still lifes, introspection. The boundary blurs between more clear-cut conceptions of daily life and abstracted visualizations of religious and familial scenes.

Maluleke’s heritage is foundational here not merely for its role as source material, but for how imbued his family and his relationship to the visual medium are in his work. The people in these works could be his uncle, his sister, his mother, his father, or one of the many along the way who present the existential dilemmas that spirituality oftentimes brings. Maluleke places us into dinner scenes, early mornings at church, at his own funeral—whether we step into these or not is guided by Maluleke’s approach to his viewer.

In his exhibitions, he explains, “I want to leave the door open so that people can come in, but I also want the viewer to be able to pay attention to a different part, where you don’t have to pay attention to the door, you can just leave it ajar. If somebody wants to walk in and they are curious, and they are curious of their own volition, they make up their own ideas. Once you’re inside the door and you’ve formulated your own ideas, then we can start having a conversation.”

Maluleke’s work is always reaching outside of its own parameters. His use of vibrant hues and tendency to build rich characters is rooted in his moving back and forth between this medium and his background in animation. “The idea of world-building for animation is very specific.” He continues, “This sounds a little bit blasphemous, but it’s like you’re almost a god of something else, where you are inventing a world, you are creating life, and you’re breathing life into characters as you are drawing them. Coming from that background, I wanted to not neglect the fact that these characters, as much as some of them will become, are the same, but they have stories behind them. And so in terms of technique, my work can sometimes be harsh in terms of angles and how clear-lined it can be. That being said, I always enjoy this balance of these clear lines, and within those clear lines, clear parameters, they can still be chaotic.”

In “A Meaningful Sacrifice” (2024), Maluleke invokes character and charisma in the child’s possession of the lamb. It’s doing something that many artists are afraid to touch in their processes, which is to provide an honest and earnest reflection on religiosity. Maluleke is constantly guided by the pressing question of religion—“In today’s world, [religion] feels much more polarizing. It’s like some are getting deeper into religion and some are absolutely outside of it. There’s no longer a middle point. So it feels—and I feel like the biggest part of why religion can be scary even for me—this is almost like a reflection of myself. It wants all of you. It wants you entirely.”

Maluleke’s body of work doesn’t turn its cheek from reality or the question of faith, but instead flags a question that hovers over the collective consciousness. Like a Fish in Water is a beautiful homage to genealogy and lineage, demonstrating Maluleke’s inheritance of a tradition and culture he is navigating his own place in. He debuts himself as an ever-progressing vessel of experience, piercing through the obviousness of daily life. His voice and sense of place evades disingenuity because he in large part is carrying the weight of tradition on his back. The fish in the water might float on through the pulsing of the waves, or might be fighting to not be swallowed—the fish is within people like Maluleke or his viewer. We all must accept the fate of death one day, but how do we spend each day before then?

Like a Fish in the Water was synthesized before Maluleke even knew it to be. He cites a large artistic influence in his life, longtime family friend and legendary South African sculptor, Jackson Hlungwani. He reminisces, “Like a Fish in the Water is not just a title. It actually comes from this expression from [Hlungwani]. When you’d meet him, you would ask him how are you doing? He would always say, like a fish in the water. When I was young, my dad took me to go see him back in Limpopo where I lived. He lived in a remote village. He gifted me this sculpture, his iconic sculpture of a fish, and that’s why you start seeing the fish in the works of this exhibition. My dad told him that I’m also an artist, so he got excited and that’s why he gave me the sculpture. It now represents this gift of igniting something within me that I feel so passionate about.”

We are transported to a two-dimensional world in Maluleke’s works where we live among earthy tones, vivid oranges and royal azures, sailing through in a continuous lifecycle like that of a fish, in our natural elements. He places us in the omniscient center of it all in a gallery somewhere in Los Angeles. Formed in love and homage to his sister, “Nozipho’s Love” (2024) is the pinnacle of the pure goodness woven into the experience. “It’s my sister, but in this Virgin Mary-esque form. Drawing my sister feels like a self-portrait. I avoid doing a lot of self-portraits, but when I draw my sister, it feels like it’s a cheat code into drawing myself. She feels similar to me. We come from the same parents. We have the same ancestors. In a lot of ways, she is me in a different body, in a different life, doing something else. But in a sense of where we have that sort of connection. Growing up, she was very nurturing and very protective of me.” As she cradles a baby Maluleke, we are pulled into the transcendental world between heaven and hell, the birth and death of Terence Maluleke.

By the end of the exhibition, we arrive at a funeral for the artist. In “Maluleke, Forever” (2024), we stand silently over the tombstone contending with death, the impermanent nature of human life on this planet. Terence Maluleke is very much alive and well, but by the end of his process materializing his ideas on canvas, he is intensely aware of a trivial fact of life.

The fact in question: not solely that his time is limited. Rather, that the further entropic life is, the more meaningful it is made through its chaos.

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