While Tlabela's formative development unfolded in Cape Town, his early memories of artistic creation involved sketching cities and roads in the sand alongside his cousins while visiting their grandparents in rural Limpopo. His path towards becoming an artist crystallised during high school, marked by the entrepreneurial spirit of spray-painting customised graffiti tags on his peers’ belongings for additional income.

Tlabela studied printmaking at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art, but subsequently shifted to painting. His multi-panelled tableaux are self-referential, depicting Black protagonists – often himself – in highly stylised domestic or architectural spaces that offer a lens into the imagined lives of the Black elite. Incorporating collage, his building of these worlds is decidedly postmodern, citing well-known works by South African artists, iconic furniture and design objects, popular sneaker brands, cut-out figures from magazines and reappropriated texts.

In Tlabela’s universe, prosperity and self-determination are conjured by highly symbolic signifiers – including notable paintings by Black artists such as Kerry James Marshall and novels by the likes of Candice Carty-Williams and Zadie Smith. He delves into desire, aspiration and belonging, as filtered through the lens of the generation who inherited the promises of liberation and Black economic freedom in the post-democracy. “I am looking at various ways to depict wealth, be it property, valued commodities such as art by Black artists, a solid Black family structure, and knowledge distribution,” he has said. 

Tlabela has held two solo exhibitions: NEGRO SUNSHINE (2017) at North West University Gallery in Potchefstroom, South Africa, and Feels Like Summer (2023) at Wilde Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland. His work was selected for Ganda the Rhino Project in Brazil, Poland and Portugal (2014-2015), and When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting (2023) at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. He has participated in fairs such as Frieze London, FIAC, 1-54 London and New York, Liste Art Fair Basel and RMB Latitudes, and in group shows in Lagos, London and New York. He was an artist-in-residence at Southern Guild’s GUILD Residency in Cape Town in 2022 and presented his work through the gallery at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and Untitled Art in Miami, both in 2023.