Peter Mammes

Peter Mammes was born in 1986 in Krugersdorp. He has worked on drawings and artwork from a young age. For the most part an autodidact, his training has also included an apprenticeship in a puppet theatre and with a set designer working on theatre productions. As a child experiencing the transition in the country, he observed the rapid transformation of our collective social and economic norms, and the conflicted and often clumsy responses to those changes. His observation of the amorphous historical narratives told by the successive governments ruling South Africa has been a major factor in his development as an artist. He uses his artwork to pose questions about the construction of the narratives of power and authority, the intersection of individual and national identity and the suppression and celebration of the ugly and unacceptable. Peter has sought out what it means to be African while travelling from Cape Town to Cairo, on public transport. He has also lived and worked in Moscow, London, and Varanasi. The process of his artwork begins with drawings and graduates to painting; but more recently he has created sculptural artworks.