Matete Motubatse

Matete Motubatse was born in 1991 in Polokwane, Limpopo, South Africa. His work is influenced by Hyperrealism and Photorealism, and his practice centers figurative digital painting as an assertion of presence. He portrays his friends and ordinary people against flat, minimal backgrounds, allowing their direct gaze to establish a space of confrontation and recognition. Through the repetition of tone, composition, and skin color, he constructs a collective portrait grounded in intimacy and quiet authority. The work explores visibility not as spectacle, but as a shared, relational power. He shoots photographs and turns them into black and white so he can see the colours of his digital brush strokes when he paints on top of them on a laptop in Microsoft Paint. After finishing his digital paintings on Microsoft Paint he uploads the artworks on Chatgpt to repaint them for blended colours and smooth textures.