Michele Mathison was born in South Africa in 1977 and raised in Zimbabwe. Through sculpture and installation, his work has consistently drawn from observations of daily, lived experience in order to interpret the shifting dynamics of political, social and economic conditions in Southern Africa and how they relate to our communal and individual concerns.

His sculptures are a study on the value of familiar objects and materials highlighting their historical narratives, common usage and inherited value in our shared identities. Disrupting the common apprehension of his chosen medium the works monumentalise the purity of their form, function and symbolic guise.

Mathison completed his BFA at Michaelis School of Fine Arts, University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2000. He has had several solo exhibitions with WHATIFTHEWORLD, including CIVILIAN (2023) Over and over (2021) and States of Emergence (2017). Other noteworthy solo exhibitions include: Dissolution (2018) and Uproot (2016) at Tyburn Gallery, London; Harvest (2015) at the Zeitz MOCAA Scheryn Pavilion, Cape Town and EXIT/EXILE (2014) at Nirox Projects, Johannesburg.

Representing Zimbabwe at the 55th Venice Biennale, this body of work, titled, Harvest, was later installed at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) as a special presentation for the opening of the museum in 2017, alongside the inaugural group exhibition. Mathison has also shown the large-scale work Parallax at Frieze Sculpture in London (2018) and installed the public sculpture, Angular Mass (2017), for the V&A Waterfront and Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town. He spent much of 2019 in residence in Italy at Muse Salentine, Alessano and Castello San Basilio, Pisticci and in 2020 he relocated from Johannesburg to Cape Town. In 2021, the artist completed a series of three significant public sculptures, commissioned by North-West University and installed on various sites on campus.

Noteworthy group exhibitions include Inner Landscapes (2019) at Galleria Anna Marra, Rome, and Broken English (2015) at Tyburn Gallery, London.

Mathison is included in collections such as the Norval Foundation’s Homestead collection, the Zeitz MOCAA permanent collection, the Leridon Collection, Spier Arts Trust and the Standard Bank Art Collection. Most recently, Mathison’s work was acquired by the Celine Art Project, curated by Hedi Slimane for Celine Shanghai.