Matthew Hindley

Matthew Hindley (1974 – 2025) graduated in 2002 from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, where he was awarded the Michaelis Prize for the best exhibition in his graduating year. In October 2025, Matthew passed away unexpectedly at the age of 51. His sudden departure left a profound void in the art world, but his groundbreaking and visionary body of work lives on as an enduring source of inspiration.

As one of South Africa’s most recognized painters of his generation, Hindley’s intense, poetic, and profound artworks were featured in various critical and pioneering South African and international exhibitions. A series of solo exhibitions outlines a loose progression from figuration to abstraction. From the show “An Everlasting Once” at Brundyn in Cape Town (2011) to the transitional work “The Divided Self” and culminating in “Double Rainbow” (2021), the progression in his relationship with painting is mapped, developing as a non-figurative exploration. Hindley’s practice also maintained a deep interest in the potential of science to produce art, which is reflected in several key works.

His later abstract paintings open up the viewer’s field of response, offering a fresh perspective on his practice and trajectory. Hindley’s engagement with technology as a continuous pursuit added an interactive realm of vision and experience. This reactivity to the physical world is a hallmark of Hindley’s new media projects, such as “Speak naturally and continuously”, which is permanently installed on the facade of the Iziko South African National Gallery. The work continuously listens to conversations in the gallery’s atrium and translates them into a Dadaist and poetic text stream that can be followed live on a screen above the entrance.

A striking example of his ongoing interaction with technology is his series of electronic paintings, where a camera embedded in the frame feeds the surface of the work live. This creates a living self-portrait or still life, projected through a transparent, abstracted surface. As the scenes in front of the camera constantly shift, so does the artwork, confronting the viewer with the landscapes of their own contemporary existence. The optical mechanics of the electronic works also reference Hindley’s “Rainbow Paintings” series through their shared basis in the splitting of light in a prism, linking his love of paint with the contemporary technological era.

“The rainbow is the expression of the infinite possibilities of color; for the artist, it is the basis of the color palette itself. The breakdown of white light into its component colors offers a kind of unlocking, a window into a wondrous world.”

Hindley’s interest in technology’s ability to create new realities and possibilities naturally also led to an interest in the blockchain. In 2021, he created a collection of 50 NFTs, each linked to a unique physical watercolor, titled the Trinity Series. These works, which were launched on OpenSea as part of the Out of Africa NFT collection, stand alongside his other blockchain projects as a testament to his visionary and pioneering spirit.