With uncompromising allure, Mustafa Maluka's large-scale oil paintings depict chic, imaginary subjects through vibrant color and textured shapes. Maluka grew up in Cape Flats — Cape Town's apartheid-designated, non-white ghetto — and currently lives and works in both South Africa and Europe. After studying graphic design at the Peninsula Technikon, Maluka left his native country for de Ateliers, an independent artist institute in Amsterdam, where he first began to show internationally.

Aestheticizing a transnational and multicultural urban identity, Maluka draws from popular culture and hip-hop for his portraits. Neo-new-wave haircuts, graphic t-shirts, and geometric backdrops frame his sitters and add to their idiosyncratic identities. In Its true, we're always looking out for one another, bubblegum-pink hair and angular patterns betray cartoon influences. Maluka's signature striated faces and deadpan stares, seen in works like I can't believe you think that of me and I'm alright, I feel good, evoke consumer culture with the look of weathered advertisements.

While loosely resembling Andy Warhol's celebrity portraits, Maluka's anonymous characters are his own invention. Culling imagery from fashion magazines and the mass media, Maluka imbues the everyday with a sense of heroism, eschewing the pedestrian in favor of a fierce sense of grandeur. The artist's figures speak to the immigrant experience and recall the multicultural identity he formed as a youth in segregated South Africa.

Maluka's peripatetic life as a DJ and the co-creator of Africanhiphop.com also bears influence on his visual art. With titles that reference song lyrics, his paintings testify to music's capacity to disrupt borders and form connections between marginalized individuals around the world.

-Thomas J. Lax