Reclining woman catches Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi at full stretch, in the period when the dense, contorted figuration of works like Tears of Africa had crystallised into a completely distinctive language of Black female embodiment. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, after training with John Koenakeefe Mohl, Bill Ainslie and others, Sebidi had forged her signature mix of rough, worked surfaces, saturated colour and compressed anatomy – a mode of African modernism that won her the Standard Bank Young Artist Award and later the Order of Ikhamanga. This pastel belongs squarely to that high point: the body is heavy yet alert, intimate yet monumental, insisting on the psychic and spiritual weight carried by Black women in both rural and urban South Africa. The swirling, almost stippled mark-making and skewed perspective fold dream, memory, and daily fatigue into a single, electric image. Positioned against the more crowded multi-figure scenes for which she is now known, Reclining woman reads as a concentrated self-portrait of Sebidi’s project itself – to channel ancestral knowledge and contemporary strain through a single, visionary figure, rendered with the technical confidence and imaginative reach of the artist at the peak of her powers.