Matthew Hindley

Biography

Above the entrance to the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, Matthew Hindley installed a display made of glowing dots. It listened to conversations in the atrium and turned them into a running line of text, poetic and half nonsensical, in the spirit of the Dadaists. The work is called “Speak Naturally and Continuously”. Under this title Hindley had already shown a solo exhibition at the same gallery in 2005; the display appeared above the entrance in 2015, and in late 2018 and early 2019 it was rebuilt and in May 2019 reopened to the public.

Hindley was born in 1974 in Cape Town, and he lived and worked there.

In 2002 he graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town and received the Michaelis Prize for the best final exhibition of his year. The following years were filled with solo exhibitions: “Infra-Red” at the school’s gallery (2003), “Surrender” at the Bell-Roberts Gallery and a show at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn (2004), “Before My Time” at the Cape Town gallery 34Long (2006), a private vernissage in Berlin (2007). In 2005 his exhibition “Absolute Chop”, art-directed by Zwelethu Mthethwa, was held at Mzoli’s, a butchery and grill in the township of Gugulethu.

His large oils on linen, three metres by two or two by two, bore titles such as “Kill the Lights!” (2009), “The End of the World” and “The Ache of Marriage” (both 2010), “An Everlasting Once” and “The Waking Spell” (both 2011). What they depict has to be judged mainly from the titles and a few reproductions. Exhibitions of these years include “An Everlasting Once” at the Brundyn+ gallery in Cape Town (2011), “Twilight of the Idols” at the Biksady gallery in Budapest (2013) and projects at fairs in Basel (2011 and 2012). In 2012 his short film was shown at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in Michigan and at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India. For a book by the South African writer Don Mattera, “The Five Magic Pebbles & other stories”, published in Berlin, he painted a series of pictures based on African mythological tales; an exhibition of his drawings at David Krut’s gallery in Cape Town coincided with the book’s launch. In 2015 a work by Hindley entered the Benetton Foundation’s Imago Mundi collection, shown in Venice during the Biennale, and the exhibition “TWENTY: Contemporary Art from South Africa” took his pieces from the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in North Carolina to the Beijing Biennale. In October of that year his exhibition “Resurrection (Der Brennende Wald)” opened at the Everard Read gallery in Cape Town.

Hindley was interested in what technology could give painting. In his electronic pictures a camera built into the frame projects an image through a translucent abstract surface, and the portrait changes constantly with whatever is happening in front of it. The series of “rainbow” paintings is tied to the same optical experiments: he called the rainbow, the splitting of white light into colours, the basis of the palette itself. His late works were devoted to volume, light and shade.

In 2018 came the exhibitions “The Divided Self” at Everard Read in Cape Town and “Survey of Risk” at David Krut’s gallery in Johannesburg, in 2019 “The Brush Itself Incites” at the gallery of the Silo hotel in Cape Town, and in 2021 “Double Rainbow” in Knysna. In the same year, 2021, his work was shown at the Espronceda Institute in Barcelona in the exhibition “National Identity”, alongside William Kentridge and Zanele Muholi. In 2023 his exhibition “Memoryscapes” opened in Franschhoek.

In 2025 his paintings were included in “We the People: 30 Years of Democracy in South Africa” at the Norval Foundation and in a show at Everard Read in London. Hindley died in Cape Town that same year.