Junkyard dogs: A powerful exhibition by SA icons, Pitika Ntuli and Willie Bester

The Melrose Gallery’s new show – Junkyard Dogs – stars two celebrated South African artists, Willie Bester and Pitika Ntuli. Both are fixated with junk, upcycling, recycling, re-envisioning waste. As such, they are classically African artists, for the artists of no other continent have displayed a more ingenious and innovative capacity to reboot-retool the excesses of industrial surplus. Africa is the dumpsite. African artists the diviners.  

As for ‘Junkyard Dogs’? They are fierce guardians, ruthless, unbreakable. If the descriptor fits Willie Bester and Pitika Ntuli, it is because both were forged out of a resistance culture, both the products of an on-going fight for freedom. This is because Ntuli, like Bester, understands art as an embodied force. Sculpture is the key medium. As Ad Reinhardt wittily remarked, ‘Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.’ It commands and consumes space. In the case of Bester and Ntuli, the mediums are metal and granite, a fusion of the man-made, and the organic. The scale is commanding. Demanding. We cannot unsee a gesture or proposition, because both artists possess a declamatory power. 

Do not expect piety or composure in this show. Its thrust is to up-end convention, disorient value, open truth. While both artists have emerged from a culture of resistance, neither is an ideologue. Rather, politics is implicit – a by-product of a given works animus, its concentrated energy. In African art – namely in its wooden masks – this force is ancient. In the case of Bester and Ntuli, this energy is worked through industrial waste. After Donna Haraway, it is a cyborg art – a fusion of Man and Machine. 

After Ad Reinhardt, it is a show one bumps into, negotiates, confronts. At every point, we are answerable to the artists’ love-songs to decay, their desire in-and-through the revitalisation of waste matter to restore an invigorated beauty into our overwhelmed and exhausted lives. In this show, installation meets soundscape meets sculpture.         

Pitika Ntuli was born in 1940 in Springs and grew up in Witbank in Mpumalanga. While a teacher, artist and critical thinker living under the threat of apartheid in the sixties and seventies, Ntuli was forced into exile in Swaziland and arrested and made a political prisoner until 1978, when international pressure forced his release to the UK. Having already completed an MFA at Pratt Institute in New York in 1977, he finished an MA at Brunel University in London, in 1985 after which he lectured art at various international and South African universities including; Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Wits University. He was an artist in residence in the 1980s and ‘90s at schools and colleges in London. Among many other leadership appointments at South African universities, he served as Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the UDW. His contribution to the development of arts and culture in South Africa has been immense. He served as director at the Sankofa Institute for the African Renaissance and Fellow of the Mapungubwe Institute, among many other fellowships. He was awarded the Arts and Culture Trust – Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013 and the City of Johannesburg named him a ‘Living Legend’ in 2012. 

He has curated several exhibitions. In his capacity as an artist he has staged numerous solo exhibitions in South Africa, Germany and the United Kingdom. His works grace numerous important corporate, private – such as Paul Simon, USA, and Akufo Addo, Ghana - and public collections such as the African American Institute, New York, USA and Constitutional Court, Johannesburg, SA. 

Primarily a sculptor, Pitika’s work expresses a sense of haunting loneliness – a distress at the pillaging of a continent and culture through the lens of post-colonialism. His stark skeletal structures are created in any physical medium he can find: metal, wood, stone, and bone and can range from small to monumental works in granite that weigh in excess of 19 tons. "In Art, the creative act is a titanic battle between flesh and spirit. Each artwork is a diversion of the flesh, the body. Each time the artist dies, a new work is born, or rather the opposite: each time a work of art is born the artist dies a little. A little death invokes a greater desire to live and thus creates another artwork. When the artist dies finally, she continues to live through her offspring – her children and her artworks. " While there is an element of darkness on display in his work, there is a strong sense of wit and tongue-in-check irony present in each of his sculptures. 

Dr Willie Bester is cited globally as one of South Africa's most important resistance artists. He incorporates recycled material into his paintings, assemblages and sculpture, creating powerful artworks that speak against political, social and economic injustice. For Willie, the personal is political, and being apolitical in South Africa is “a dangerous luxury that we cannot afford”. 

Willie lives in Kuilsrivier in the Western Cape, and spends his time away from his studio scouring scrap yards sourcing material for use in his artworks. His artworks are hard hitting and demand the full attention of the viewer. These range from larger than life sized steel sculptures that weigh several tons to realistic oil and acrylic paintings framed in hand beaten and painted iron. 

The shoes of missing children, the Swastika, symbols and representations of Apartheid South Africa and scenes of informal settlements that speak to poverty present themselves in Willie’s artworks to bear witness to the ills in our society. Willie has participated in many solo and group exhibitions both locally and internationally and he is considered so important that he is part of the South African school curriculum. 

He has won numerous awards including the Order of the Disa from the South African Government and was awarded with an honorary doctorate from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) in 2019. 

His artworks grace numerous important private, corporate and public collections including the Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Pretoria Art Museum, University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand, UNISA, Department of National Education, Smithsonian Institute, Jean Pigozzi – Contemporary African Art Collection, David Bowie Collection and many others. Dr Willie Bester’s artworks speak to our history, our present and beg the question of our future.The exhibition runs from 29 August until 31 October 2025 at The Melrose Gallery in Johannesburg.