South Africa Contemporary art
Cornelius Bosch is a South African expressionist painter known for his figurative works created in various techniques, including painting, drawing and sculpture. Bosch was educated at Stellenbosch University and began his artistic career in the 1980s. Bosch's paintings are characterised by a bold use of colour and dynamic composition, often with geometric shapes and brushwork gestures. Throughout his career he exhibited widely both in South Africa and abroad, and his works are held in several public collections, including the South African National Gallery of Iziko and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Lisa Brice is a South African painter and visual artist from Cape Town. She lives in London and cites some of her influences as her experiences growing up in South Africa during a time of political upheaval, and from time spent living and working in Trinidad.
Her work is held in collections around the world, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Johannesburg Art Gallery, The Whitworth, the High Commission of South Africa, London and the private collection of Sindika Dokolo.
Marlene Dumas is a Dutch artist of South African origin. She is known for her figurative paintings that explore themes of identity, race, gender, and sexuality.
Dumas studied at the University of Cape Town and later moved to the Netherlands, where she earned a degree from the Ateliers '63 in Haarlem. Her early work was heavily influenced by the political and social climate in South Africa during the apartheid era.
Dumas' paintings often depict people in various states of vulnerability, intimacy, and emotion. Her works are characterized by loose, gestural brushstrokes, and a limited color palette. She frequently draws inspiration from popular culture, news media, and art history, often appropriating and reimagining images from these sources.
Dumas has exhibited her work extensively, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tate Modern in London. She has also received numerous awards and honors for her work, including the Johannes Vermeer Award in 2012 and the Premium Imperiale in 2018.
Mo Edoga is a Nigerian-born physician and installation artist who has worked as a doctor in South Africa and as an artist in Germany.
He studied medicine in Heidelberg and first worked as a neurosurgeon in Johannesburg, South Africa. Since 1982 he lived in Mannheim and had a studio. He became famous in 1988 when, after a flood on the Rhine, he collected driftwood and garbage and created his first tower out of them, calling it the "Heavenly Sphere." In fact, his art installations have always been a place where communication has to take place. Mo Edoga liked to talk to people not only about his art, but also about many other topics during the course of his work.
David Goldblatt was a South African photographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the period of apartheid. After apartheid had ended he concentrated more on the country's landscapes. What differentiates Goldblatt's body of work from those of other anti-apartheid artists is that he photographed issues that went beyond the violent events of apartheid and reflected the conditions that led up to them.
Pieter Hugo is a South African portrait and documentary photographer recognized for capturing the marginalized peoples of the continent. He lives and works in Cape Town.
Hugo is a self-taught photographer, primarily because there was nowhere to get an education in photography theory and history in Cape Town. After graduating from high school, he immediately became a practicing photographer. He subsequently participated in many exhibitions and published four monographs.
William Kentridge is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films, especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s. The latter are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds' screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
Kentridge has created art work as part of design of theatrical productions, both plays and operas. He has served as art director and overall director of numerous productions, collaborating with other artists, puppeteers and others in creating productions that combine drawings and multi-media combinations.
Dylan Lewis is a South African painter and sculptor based in Stellenbosch.
Dylan Lewis, who began his career as a painter, later turned his full attention to sculpting the wildlife of Africa. Lewis conveys his fascination with the habits and movements of wild animals and especially big cats: jumping and pulling, resting and hunting - their expressive physical forms are mesmerizing in the sculptor's works.
Over time, Lewis's works become more abstract, although they remain recognizable: he gradually switched to human figures. Naturalism receded into the background, giving way to the mystical. Some sculptures are missing heads and legs, others are masked, others have grown wings - it is obvious that the artist is trying to show the commonality of all life on Earth.
Dylan Lewis has created a unique sculpture garden where some of his most famous bronze pieces can be seen in their natural environment.
Buhle Wonder Mbambo is a Durban-based visual artist from Kwa-Ngcolosi, a village that is still ruled by a chief. Mbambo started art as a hobby at the age of nine. He says that his mother encouraged him to explore art as a career as he used to play with charcoal from the fire and draw stick figures on the walls of the house as a child. He received his first formal training through the BAT Centre Artists in Residency (AIR) Program and went on to study fine art through the Velobala apprenticeship program at Durban University of Technology, under the mentorship of Themba Shibase.
John Meyer is a South African painter.
He has exhibited extensively in South African and abroad specialising in landscapes and portraits (including portraits of Nobel laureates Nelson Mandela and FW De Klerk and concert pianist Vladimir Horowitz) in a photo-realist style. More recently he describes his work as falling into what he terms a "narrative genre" where paintings are often part of a series (usually three to six) of chronological scenes.
He has exhibited at the Slater Memorial Museum (Connecticut) and the Everard Read Gallery (Johannesburg).
Zanele Muholi is a South African photographer and LGBT activist.
She works in the fields of photography, video and installation. Muholi's work focuses on race, gender and sexuality, with the bulk of her work documenting and celebrating the lives of black lesbians, gays, transgender and intersex people in South Africa.
