Nukain Mabuza’s Painted Rock Garden by Obie Oberholzer

Original photograph by South African photographer Obie Oberholzer.

Nukain Mabuza (c. 1914–1981) was a self-taught South African "outsider artist" famous for creating the Painted Rock Garden of Revolver Creek. A farm labourer by trade, Mabuza spent decades transforming the granite boulders on a hillside near Barberton, Mpumalanga, into a vibrant environmental masterpiece using donated commercial paints.

His work is recognised as one of only 44 authentic examples of "Environmental Outsider Art" worldwide.

Petrus Cornelius Jacobus (Obie) Oberholzer (near Pretoria , 1947 ) is a South African photographer.
Oberholzer studied graphic design at Stellenbosch University in the late 1960s and then photography at the Bayerischen Landesanstalt für Fotografie in Munich in the early 1970s , where he later returned to complete his master's degree in 1979 .

In the mid-1970s he worked as a commercial photographer for Deutsche Condor Film and taught at the Natal Technikon, part of the Durban University of Technology . In 1993 he became Professor of Photography at the School of Fine Arts of Rhodes University in Grahamstown , Eastern Cape , where he was appointed Associate Professor in 1999.

He has exhibited his work worldwide, including in Venlo and Roermond in 2010.

Artist John Frederick Casper Clarke (1946 - 2021) spent years documenting the garden before it began to fade, publishing books like The Painted Stone Garden of Nukain Mabuza.
“In the following pages I have again presented, in a revised and updated form, the story of Mabuza’s life as an Outsider artist. In addition, in the chapter The Legacy of the Stone Garden, I have attempted to set down the Mabuza story since 1982 ‐ a story that is still ongoing ‐ of the different ways in which the artist and the Stone Garden have influenced and motivated other artists as well as designers and craftsmen.” JFC Clarke Pretoria 2013.

355mm x 280mm

R1,000