LH Phanzu

Louis Herick is a talented artist from the Democratic Republic of Congo and calls Cape Town home. He attained a National Senior Certificate from the Institute Des Beaux-Arts De Kinshasa in 2001.  Louis Herick was born in 1982. He is the fourteenth child in a family of nineteen children on his father’s side and the sixth child in a family of seven on his mother’s side. Growing up in a large, diverse, polygamist family, though unique was challenging. 

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The loss of Louis Herick Phanzu’s mother at the age of four was seminal to his identification as an artist: “In his familial context, the mother acts as a bridge to a child’s well-being; to make the child’s needs known to the father and, most importantly, as an umbrella of protection against the tensions sibling rivalry present.”

 

From an early age, art became both an intuitive means of coping with grief and of building a bridge to the greater world in the abscene of a primal conduit. The mediums of sketching and painting were alchemical tools. Initially an escape hatch then a life raft to bear intense emotions, creating art soon became a sacred process that allowed him to evoke the contours of transformation through purifying fires. 

 

After a stint offering services such as house painting, room decorations, drawings, and calligraphy on the walls, Louis Herick enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts/Kinshasa in 1994 at the urging of one of his brothers, skin, and bone disease Doctor for the public sector in the DRC. 

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A central theme in Louis Herick’s paintings is a metamorphosis - not as mere concept, but as a perpetual practice of succumbing to the energies potent enough to dissolve ego. The metamorphosis Louis Herick offers those who participate in his art is to anchor one being in the hot core of insight at each phase of earthly realisation in community. 

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A selection of Louis Herick Phanzu’s paintings are currently on display at the gallery Art Haus Sea Point.