Sakez

Full name: Sakhumzi Gabuza, but works under “Sakez”

Sakez is a Cape Town-based surreal expressionist and pointillist whose work tears through the boundaries of the seen and the felt. Rooted in chaos, pain, beauty, and myth, his compositions are emotional autopsies—portraits of what the soul looks like when stripped bare.

Entirely self-taught, with formal training in Multimedia and Design, Sakez channels a rare visual dialect combining obsessive dotwork with fluid strokes of oil and ink. Through this marriage of mediums, his subjects emerge as fragmented beings: gods with fractured wings, faces grinning while breaking, skins shedding to reveal the raw muscle of memory and emotion.

His art doesn’t aim to comfort—it confronts. Each piece is a battle between dualities: freedom and bondage, euphoria and agony, divine power and human fragility. The figures in his work twist and mutate, often chained, ripped open, or multiplying, mirroring the psychological violence of existing in a world that demands masks while hiding your truth.
His influences rise from within trauma, spiritual searching, identity, and a deep desire to tell the stories that words can’t hold. What results is a body of work that is both intensely personal and universally resonant. To witness his art is to enter a realm where emotion bleeds into vision, and darkness is painted as sacred.

For Sakez, art is not decoration. It’s transformation.