Portrait of an artist in progress

1995

Zipho Tony Gum was born in Cape Town.

2015

While studying film at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Gum’s instagram self-portraits — playful interrogations of clashing cultural references — began to get serious attention. Vogue magazine in the US called her “the coolest girl in Cape Town”, she was named one of Artsy magazine’s “top 10 young artists to know” and she appeared on the cover of Sweet Medicine, the awardwinning novel by Panashe Chigumadzi.

2016

Gum was a featured artist at the Joburg and Cape Town art fairs, was chosen to exhibit at Art Basel Miami and was a finalist for the jury prize at the Pulse contemporary art fair in New York.

Her collections, Milked in Africa and Free da Gum, used dark iconography to throw a fresh light on art and life in Africa. In response to those who saw her work as “unchallenging”, South African art critic Ashraf Jamal wrote: “Millennials are not necessarily buying into our blame-and-shame game. Rather, they seek experiences or projections that more optimistically rewire, defy, forget, or overturn our pathological optic.”

2017

Gum presented her first major solo exhibition, Ode to She, at the Christopher Moller Gallery in Cape Town. It illuminated her traditional

Xhosa heritage through the lens of a thoroughly modern millennial.

2019

Gum's images were shown at PhotoLondon 2019 and her solo exhibition, A Portion, opened in Cape Town last week. The works, combining painting, photography, performance art and video installation, reveal a new level of maturity for Gum, both as a woman of reconciled complexities and as an artist of growing profundity.