Adilson De Oliveira unpacks how Sheppard transforms printmaking’s logic into a conceptual language of reclamation, rupture, and quiet defiance.
Nathaniel Sheppard III, Salt Water (Detail), 2025. Watercolour on 300gsm Hahnemuhle. Courtesy of the artist and Flood House.
‘Soul Revue’ is not a quiet show. It’s composed, intentional—but its restraint is loaded. Like the uncle at every family gathering who sits back, observing, unbothered, always cool. He doesn’t speak often, but when he does, the room stills—people listen. Nathaniel Sheppard III has become that figure to a generation he quietly helped school in the art world. Not by preaching, but by example. His presence has always been steady, his practice deeply studied. And now, with ‘Soul Revue’, he speaks—and the timing feels deliberate.
For over a decade, Sheppard ran DGI Studios. Not out of some tragic necessity—but because that’s what needed doing. The so-called constraints weren’t economic in the dramatic sense. They were political, circumstantial. The kind of pressures that come with being young, independent, and unwilling to toe the good man’s line. The frictions of collectivity. The boredom of waiting. The art world, as always, prefers its radicals polished—or punished.
‘Soul Revue’ doesn’t ask for entry. It sidesteps the gate entirely. The work is exacting, conceptually taut, emotionally loaded—just coded enough to slip through the usual filters, but packed tightly enough to detonate once inside. A Trojan horse in pastel. Baby blues, cotton-candy pinks, gentle curves. Cuteness used with precision. Not innocence—strategy.
He’s not here for applause. Never was. The studio ran because it had to. Printing, after all, is work. Hard, technical, repetitive. Thankless. But it builds something. And over the years, that something—prints, paintings, collage—stacked up. Not as legacy, not quite. More like evidence. Breadcrumbs scattered across a map few bothered to follow.
Nathanial Sheppard III, After Hours (Detail), 2025. 24 colour silkscreen print on 300gsm 100% cotton Tiepolo. Edition of 25. Courtesy of the artist and Flood House.
For years, Sheppard was the printmaker, his work contained by the very medium that defined him. But the work being made now lands differently. His paintings are not simply a surprise—they are an eruption. The art world, so accustomed to framing him as a printmaker, now finds itself re-categorising him. What once seemed like a craft now demands attention on a broader scale. This is the emotional weight of his entire practice, now realised on canvas—a form of visual archiving, a method of extraction from print culture and the rawness of collective practice, brought into the realm of the individual.
This journey is, in part, shaped by his father, Nathaniel Sheppard Jr., an African American journalist who worked for the Chicago Tribune and served as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. It was during his time covering apartheid in South Africa that he met Sheppard’s mother, Soraya Sheppard. This intersection of personal and political histories shaped Sheppard’s worldview—one informed by images and stories from across the globe, from the harsh realities of apartheid to the transformative power of art as a medium for personal and political expression.
His father’s collection, nearly all from the Global South, included Haitian paintings, Romare Bearden collages, and works chosen not for status, but for their personal resonance. Surrounded by these images, Sheppard learned that value is something personal, not inherited. It gave him a deep belief in access—to both making and owning art—and challenged conventional hierarchies of taste, defying the idea of what images should look like, and who they’re for.
The stark contrast between the polished, high-end gallery space and Alex’s intimate, nascent project space—still to be named—adds a significant layer of meaning to Sheppard’s work in ‘Soul Revue’. It’s a setting that feels rooted in a process of refinement, but it also harks back to a time of experimentation, the kind that Sheppard knows well. His work, which has moved from a more technical focus to a deeply conceptual space, seems almost to breathe in this intimate, raw environment.
Nathanial Sheppard III, After Hours (Detail), 2025. 24 colour silkscreen print on 300gsm 100% cotton Tiepolo. Edition of 25. Courtesy of the artist and Flood House.
Alex’s project space, humble and still developing, mirrors a similar tension. It’s not a space of completion, but of beginnings—unfinished, in transition. Here, Sheppard’s work no longer resides within a purely technical framework; it reflects a careful distance from the press, not as a rejection of the medium, but as a refinement of what the medium can embody. This sense of restraint, layered with history, technique, and intention, pulses more loudly in the intimacy of the space, where the work can speak to its audience without the barriers of traditional gallery expectations. The careful deliberation of his aesthetic decisions becomes even more pronounced in this contrast, from the surface of the work to the space it occupies, feeling purposeful, direct, and present.
The screenprints weren’t pulled by Sheppard himself. Instead, they were produced by Alexandre Vosloo of Flood House. Years ago, the two operated neighbouring studios out of Victoria Yards—parallel, unassuming rivals whose mutual respect grew through proximity, precision, and quiet observation. It wasn’t collaboration then, but a kind of call and response: each aware of the other’s output, choices, and discipline. The decision to now hand Vosloo the files, years later, carries a quiet weight. These works aren’t outsourced; they’re interpreted. Vosloo doesn’t merely execute—he reads, reassembles, understands.
That distinction matters. Because for Sheppard, printmaking was never just technical—it was philosophical. His practice moves between image and process, between painting and printing, between individual authorship and collective experimentation. Years spent at the underground-revered DGI print studio—a space he co-founded—shaped this ethos. But the real story isn’t the studio. It’s the methodology.
Screen-printing taught Sheppard discipline. Under the influence of printmaker and artist Minenkulu Ngoyi, he learned control, fidelity, and how to build an image from its fragments. The screen wasn’t just a tool—it was an arena for concept and craft to meet. His paintings, like his prints, carry that same layered logic: transparency, registration, restraint. The shift from pulling the squeegee to painting the surface didn’t dilute the work—it deepened it.
Nathaniel Sheppard III, The Native Lovely (Detail), 2025. Watercolour on 300gsm Hahnemuhle. Courtesy of the artist and Flood House.
And so, the collaboration with Vosloo isn’t a break. It’s a continuation. It’s what happens when two visual grammars—Sheppard’s and Vosloo’s—are fluent enough to speak through each other. Sheppard’s images, even in someone else’s hands, remain unmistakably his. That trust is hard-earned.
Five years ago, the idea of Alex Vosloo and Nathaniel Sheppard working together on screenprints would’ve seemed preposterous. Printers, like top chefs, guard their recipes with an almost mythical intensity. The notion of two such disparate figures collaborating felt as improbable as the KGB and CIA joining forces during the Cold War. And yet, here we are—an unexpected alliance unfolding before us. It’s like stumbling across a long-lost B-side, buried deep in the crates, waiting to be unearthed and sampled.
Sheppard has long looked to postwar Japan, to artists who turned to kawaii not as retreat but as response. After catastrophe, cuteness became critique. A way to speak of violence in colours soft enough to be seen. That same logic runs here. Sugar on the outside. Steel underneath.
This is at the heart of ‘Soul Revue’. Every element of Sheppard’s aesthetic—the colour palette, the compositional choices, even the tactile quality of the surface—is imbued with intent. But what is that intent? It is the reclamation of images that were once wielded to dehumanise Black people. ‘Salt Water’, serves as a perfect example: ethnographic portraits that once served as tools of racial categorisation are now altered. These digital reconstructions, blended with historical artefacts, are re-contextualised by Sheppard, whose fonts, texts, and symbols—drawn directly from runaway slave advertisements, Klan meeting posters, colonial postage stamps, and the white gaze that constructed Blackness as the “Other”—are not appropriations in the conventional sense. Sheppard doesn’t borrow; he steals. Yes, he steals—and I can’t help but roll my eyes as I quote Picasso’s oft-repeated line, “Great artists steal.” But for Sheppard, this is more than an unrefined mantra—it’s a calculated, radical reclamation. What he steals are the fractured, racialised remnants of history, and through them, he creates beauty.
Nathaniel Sheppard III, Salt Water, 2025. Watercolour on 300gsm Hahnemuhle. Courtesy of the artist and Flood House.
Consider the white man in blackface, a figure so thoroughly entrenched in the minstrel tradition that it resists conventional notions of ownership or copyright. Its very existence is inseparable from a history of exploitation, so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that any attempt to shield it as intellectual property feels almost absurd. Who, after all, would have the authority to prevent Nathaniel Sheppard from using it? In fact, would not such an objection—should it arise—only confirm the thrust of his work? Sheppard does not shy away from this grotesque history; rather, he turns it into material, subjecting it to a process of radical reconfiguration. His aim is not to redeem but to deconstruct, to peel back the layers of violence and humiliation embedded within the image.
Sheppard imagines a time when the archival scraps in his studio are reduced to mere confetti—irrelevant, scattered remnants of a past he has fully digested. Perhaps, in time, he will craft his own texts, his own fonts, but for now, the process is one of relentless consumption.
What makes his practice singular is the way technicality and conceptualism walk in step. He’s a painter, a printer, a researcher, and a strategist. The work is rigorous—but never cold. It’s tender without sentimentality. He engages history not to resolve it, but to recompose it.
DGI, like many artist-run collectives—both locally and globally—was built on a foundation of shared resistance and mutual experimentation. In South Africa, it occupied a generational midpoint: emerging after the trailblazing energy of Gugulective and later informing the ethos of The Magolide Collective. Internationally, it joins a lineage of radical formations such as the Black Audio Film Collective, Group Material, General Idea, and Gran Fury. These collectives reshaped the aesthetics and politics of their time—only to fracture under familiar pressures: economics, ego, burnout, and institutional capture.
Nathaniel Sheppard III, A. Opera, 2025. 4 colour silkscreen print on 300 gsm 100% Tiepolo. Edition of 40. Courtesy of the artist and Flood House.
The end of a collective isn’t defeat; it’s the birth of something new. An artist who’s lived within the pulse of a collective carries a depth of experience that the solitary artist might never know. ‘Soul Revue’ is not nostalgic. It doesn’t mourn the collective—it reflects on what remains: process, language, and care. What lingers is the methodology, not the structure.
‘Soul Revue’ isn’t a farewell,
but a track still in the making.
The truest gesture isn’t in the creation,
But in the absence where the press once laid its groove.
Adilson De Oliveira is a Johannesburg-born multidisciplinary artist, animator, and cultural practitioner whose work explores history, memory, and Luso-African identity through satire, technology, and decolonial critique. A Fine Arts graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, he began as a printmaker before shifting toward a practice that treats machines as creative collaborators. Since co-founding The Magolide Collective in 2019, De Oliveira has used mediums including drawing, video, XR, and AI to challenge the Western art canon and blur boundaries between truth and fiction. His work serves as both a resistance and an archive, capturing the complex realities of postcolonial South Africa.
