18th Mar, 2026 19:00
Modern & Contemporary Art
47
Cyrus Kabiru (Kenya 1984-)
The Blue Mamba
steel and found objects
Artwork date: 2017
Exhibited: SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, 'Pandashuka', 13 September to 21 October 2017.
Exchange Rates*: USD 11 342 – 15 752
GBP 8 379 – 11 637
EURO 9 604 – 13 339
R180,000 - R250,000
Buyers Premium
steel and found objects
Artwork date: 2017
Exhibited: SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, 'Pandashuka', 13 September to 21 October 2017.
Exchange Rates*: USD 11 342 – 15 752
GBP 8 379 – 11 637
EURO 9 604 – 13 339
(1)
165 x 180 x 51 cm
Provenance:
Private collection, Cape Town.
SMAC Gallery, Cape Town.
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
Kenyan artist Cyrus Kabiru is best known for transforming discarded materials into sculptural works that merge invention with autobiography. Working primarily with salvaged metal, technological debris, and urban refuse, Kabiru reimagines the overlooked remnants of Nairobi’s streets into objects that are at once playful, defiant, and visionary. His practice continually negotiates the space between memory and futurity, proposing alternative ways of seeing that emerge from conditions of scarcity.
Blue Mamba, from the exhibition Pandashuka, 2017, extends this language of reinvention into the sculptural form of the bicycle. Drawing on the once-abundant “black mamba” bikes that shaped the rhythms of his youth in Nairobi, Kabiru reconfigures the familiar frame into something theatrically transformed. As with his celebrated C-Stunners, functionality gives way to symbolism as he alters, embellishes and displaces components. In Blue Mamba, the bicycle becomes less a vehicle of movement than a vessel of memory – simultaneously recalling a disappearing urban fixture and projecting it into a speculative future.
Through this act of reconstruction, Kabiru does not simply preserve the past; he unsettles it. The work holds in tension both nostalgia and imagination, grounding itself in lived experience while gesturing toward an abstract, self-fashioned future.
COLLECTIONS:
The artist is represented in numerous local and international collections, notably, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), Cape Town; Studio Museum, New York; Lemaître Collection, Paris; Han Nefkens H+F Collection, Rotterdam; Kuona Trust, Nairobi; Scheryn Collection, Cape Town and the Tiroche DeLeon Collection Gibraltar.
The overall condition is excellent.
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Auction: Modern & Contemporary Art, 18th Mar, 2026
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