About
Mustafa Maluka’s large-scale portraits reflect on the relationship between identity and cultural positioning mechanisms in modern society. He combines elements from disparate images found in magazines, in ads or online. The subjects are anonymous, racially and sexually ambiguous, and the emotions are silent but still strong. Pink hair, blue or green lips and skin speckled with decidedly not-flesh-toned colors are characteristic for Maluka’s paintings. The works relate to portraiture’s long history but Maluka takes it into a contemporary context where the idealised face is replaced with the distorted features of modernity. The portraits grow out of several layers of paint and splashes of colour, leaving an impression of the creative techniques as well as of the subject’s many layers and construction processes. Mustafa Maluka studied at the De Ateliers Art Institute in Amsterdam from 1999-2001 and received his PhD from University of Amsterdam in 2006.
CV
Born 1976 in Cape Town, South Africa. Lives and works in Turku, Finland.
Education:
2002-2006: Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam
1999-2001: De Ateliers, Post-graduate Art Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
1994-1995 Graphic design, Peninsula Technicon, Cape Town, South Africa
Exhibitions in the gallery:
GMA XXX AAR (group show), 13.06 – 17.08, 2019
Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen
Disembedded, 25.09 – 31.10, 2015
Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen
Normative Positioning, 01.02 – 10.03, 2013
Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen
Accrochage (group show), 27.09 – 20.10, 2012
Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen
Cognitive Ruptures: Imagined Communities and the Multiculturalism of Fear, 09.09 – 29.10, 2011
Galerie Mikael Andersen, Berlin
Discourse in the Translation: A Pragmadialectical Analysis, 05.03 – 10.04, 2010
Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen
The Message, 02.02 – 08.03, 2008
Galerie Mikael Andersen, Berlin
What Lies Beneath, 11.08 – 09.09, 2006
Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen