Sam Nhlengethwa's lithographs are inspired by other artists

South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa has exhibited his work everywhere from Senegal to New York. He works with found images from printed matter – like posters and magazines – to make collages, which combine photography and drawing, and paintings on the themes of jazz and South Africa’s social landscape and interior spaces, from its townships to its restaurants and all the places in between.

We stumbled across Sam’s work on the internet by happy accident, and were immediately drawn to his Tributes series, a set of lithographs which honour artists including Henri Matisse, Ephraim Ngatane, Romare Bearden, Helen Sebidi and Zwelethu Mthethwa, many of whom are of South African heritage themselves. Each lithograph depicts an interior, usually with a plushy-looking sofa or chaise longue in the foreground, decorated with faithfully rendered images of other artist’s paintings, thus framing Sam’s work within an established cultural lineage. The artist’s instinctive use of colour and perspective combined with his ability to accurately translate three dimensional interior spaces into his two dimensional lithograph format makes for a serene but powerful set of images.