Simon Moroke Lekgetho (1929–1985) was a self-taught South African painter whose still lifes, landscapes and symbolic compositions bring a distinctive spiritual and philosophical inflection to modern South African art. Born near Hartbeespoort Dam, he received some drawing guidance from artists such as Walter Battiss, who recognised his talent and offered encouragement, but developed his practice largely through independent study. Lekgetho supported himself by working as a clerk in Pretoria while running an art studio from his home in Lady Selborne, where he taught drawing and painting to local students and engaged with a wider arts community.
Lekgetho’s work is distinguished from that of many of his contemporaries by its philosophical dimension. His still lifes often feature ritual objects, divination tools, calabashes, bones, herbs and objects associated with traditional healing and spiritual practice. By placing these objects at the centre of a genre normally associated with European domestic interiors and bourgeois display, Lekgetho transforms the still life into a vehicle for indigenous systems of knowledge, asserting the seriousness and dignity of African spiritual traditions within a format drawn from the Western painterly canon.
Lekgetho’s work offers an important counterpoint to more socially orientated approaches in the black South African art of his period, insisting on the interior and metaphysical dimensions of experience rather than focusing primarily on social and political conditions.
Although he has received relatively limited critical attention, his paintings are held in South African collections and he is increasingly recognised as an original and important voice within the broader tradition of modern South African art.
