Cinga Samson's 'Ukuphuthelwa' Exhibition at White Cube Explores Sleeplessness Through Haunting Paintings

Cinga Samson's debut exhibition 'Ukuphuthelwa' at White Cube's New York location presents large oil paintings exploring sleeplessness as spiritual alertness. The South African artist works with a limited palette of dark grays, near blacks, Prussian blues, and cold whites to depict crepuscular scenes of ceremonial rituals. His process involves photographing staged scenes, creating drawings from those photos, then developing paintings where figures all have white pupils emphasizing otherworldliness. The exhibition includes works like 'Ukuwelwa komda' (2026), showing a gray figure rising from a chair and skeleton with water draining through a concrete passageway, and 'Intsingiselo II' (2026) featuring dogs gathered near a white bucket with a white-pupiled dog in the foreground. Samson's paintings suggest historical scars without making them legible to Western audiences, creating an unsettling strangeness that resists comprehension. The exhibition continues through April 18 at White Cube's Upper East Side location at 1002 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. A catalog was published for Samson's 2023 show at White Cube's London outpost. The artist's work transforms staged scenes into unearthly realms where figures exist in limbo between life and death, neither acknowledging nor seeing viewers.