Mmangaliso Nzuza wants his paintings to feel like home. The Cape Town artist, born in Durban in 1998, builds large-scale figurative oil paintings from bold, angular forms and expressive marks, a visual language that nods to early Cubism while staying rooted in his own memories. One canvas in his studio, As the Red-eyed Dove Sings from 2025, takes its title from a bird whose song he remembers hearing as a child, and that pull between the familiar and the imagined runs through much of his work.

Nzuza returned to South Africa in 2022 after studying at the University of Edinburgh, setting up a makeshift studio in his garage and beginning with representational works in pencil and charcoal. His first solo exhibition with Southern Guild followed in Cape Town in 2024. Two years later, his show Ballad of the Peacock helped open the gallery's new Tribeca space in April 2026, marking his solo debut in the United States. His paintings have since appeared at Frieze London and The Armory Show, and entered the collections of the North Dakota Museum of Art and the Montecito Contemporary Art Collection. He is also set to feature at Art Basel Miami Beach in December.

The profile arrives as part of The Artsy Vanguard 2027, the platform's ninth annual list of ten emerging artists to watch, chosen this year from more than 900 nominations submitted by galleries around the world. The 2027 edition also introduces the Artsy Vanguard Acquisition Prize with the Brooklyn Museum, which will place one artist's work in the museum's permanent collection, with the winner announced on 13 November.

Nzuza is represented by Southern Guild in Cape Town and New York. In the studio visit, he talks through his process and the paintings that carry his memories of home into monumental, fractured figuration.