About the Artist

I make art about humanity and the similarities between "us" and "other". I choose subjects and stories that are counter to traditional expectations or demographics - because when I strip away expectations something much more interesting shows up.

In this way I am constantly disassembling and reassembling identities. I allow the pattern, image or concept to manifest first then I shape my work and theories around that. I use whatever ideological material is at hand. Like found objects of the mind. I allow myself to be shaped by the work as I create it.

My studio is also my safe space. Whatever happens to my world, my mind, my body. This is the place I come back to. Somewhere between paint, clay and music, I find sanctuary and always have.

Kim Mobey (born 1980) is a self-taught South African artist. Her work has sold through commercial galleries and private commissions since the age of 16, and she began regularly exhibiting in 2003 with her first solo show, sponsored by Sanlam Private Investments, in 2011.  In 2017, as a finalist for the PPC Imaginarium awards, her three-dimensional work gained wider recognition, being shown at the Turbine Art Fair, the Johannesburg Art Fair and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. In 2019 her portrait “Nora in Winter” was selected for the Top 40 shortlist for the Sanlam Portrait Award.

Within her humanistic approach, she is deeply affected by the human diaspora, ancient mythologies and modern science. Though her work is rooted in reality and documented histories, she makes generous use of artistic licence to explore intersectionality, playfully upturning notions of aesthetics, gender, race, age or class – and questioning fixed identities and how these bear out in society.