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South African, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 23 June 1929, in Johannesburg; died 31 December 2006, in London.

Painter, printmaker, draughtsman.

Albert Adams moved to Cape Town with his mother and sister at the age of four. After high school he studied at Hewat College, and attended art classes with Peter Clarke; he was refused entrance to the Michaelis School of Fine Art because of the colour of his skin....

Tunisian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 13 April 1946, in Tunis.

Painter, engraver.

Nouvelle Figuration.

After obtaining his diploma from the school of fine arts in Tunis in 1966, Ben Meftah went on to study engraving at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1966 to 1971...

South African, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1956, in Kitwe, Zambia.

Painter, sculptor, printmaker, video artist, land artist, watercolourist, curator.

Clive van den Berg came to South Africa in 1966, and trained at the University of Natal. He taught fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg ...

South African, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1974, in Pretoria.

Sculptor, printmaker, installation artist.

Wim Botha graduated from the University of Pretoria with a BA (Visual Art) in 1996, and lives in Cape Town. His work is usually controversial because of its iconoclastic nature, for example, he deconstructed the typical style of well-known South African artist J.H. Pierneef and of classical portrait busts, and he uses recycled Bibles to sculpt Christ figures. He has received a number of prestigious awards, including the first Tollman Award in ...

Tunisian, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active in France from 1972.

Born 30 May 1960, in Tunis.

Painter, engraver.

From 1980 to 1985 Meriem Bouderbala studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Aix en Provence. She lives and works in Nice. Her canvases are filled with wide bands of dark colour intersected by lighter bands. She uses greys, blue-greys, beiges and blacks. The material lets itself go from one stroke to another, evoking the weather, the dust, the sand, the light, the grain of the rock....

South African, 20th–21st century, female.

Active in Germany.

Born 29 January 1972, in Johannesburg.

Video artist, photographer, photomontage artist, printmaker, performance artist.

Appropriation Art.

After completing her undergraduate fine art studies at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) in 1993, Candice Breitz travelled to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship. She completed a Master’s degree at the University of Chicago in ...

Sudanese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1946, in Omdurman.

Draughtsman, engraver. Figures.

Mohamed Bushara studied engraving at London's Slade School of Art from 1975 to 1977: during that same period he also spent time in Paris, Aix en Provence, Switzerland and Luxembourg and, in 1979...

South African, 20th–21st century, male.

Active in France.

Born 11 August 1962, in Johannesburg.

Printmaker, choreographer, performance artist. Identity politics.

Living Art.

Steven Cohen was the first South African artist under apartheid to create confrontational performance art engaging with sexual and cultural identity. He began his career in the 1980s, while conscripted into the South African army, when he went absent without leave and learnt how to screenprint at Cape Town’s Ruth Prowse School of Art....

Egyptian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in France from 1974.

Born 27 October 1949, in Cairo.

Painter, sculptor, engraver. Figures.

Sayed Darwiche learnt painting from his father, a calligrapher. He left Egypt after the two Egyptian-Israeli wars. His drawings and paintings show the figures of men, women and children, but through a violent form of expressionist deformation which approaches the work of the Abstract Expressionist artist Wilhem De Kooning, though his chosen blend of colours gives a sense of softness and luxury. Sayed Darwiche's sculptures, carved from old wood or quarried stone, come close to abstraction. They consist of curved, taut volumes whose sensual fullness contrasts with the ruggedness of his drawings and paintings....

(b Vryherd, June 25, 1956).

South African printmaker. After attending secretarial school, she received her Fine Arts diploma from the Rorke’s Drift Art School in 1979. She played a major role in the Thupelo International Artists Workshop (see South Africa, Republic of §V 4.). Her socialist realist linocuts and woodcuts are always political, documenting such historical events as the 1976 Soweto uprising as well as less overtly political activities such as women working. Much of her work seeks to give voice to womens’ histories, both rural and urban; the viewer is confronted with South African life as seen and experienced by black women. Working in series, the artist presents in each image a narrative scene, but each works with others to tell a more complete story, as in the Removal Series (1982; Durban, A.G.). Large areas of black in these prints suggest the loneliness of an individual seated by a wall, or the overcrowded conditions of urban areas. Lines evoke the patterns of fields, cloth designs and woven mats, and give the images a dynamic quality. Dhlomo-Mautloa is married to Patrick Mautloa, and her prints have appeared in ...

South African, 20th century, male.

Born 29 June 1920, in London; died 15 March 2010, in Johannesburg.

Painter, printmaker, ceramic artist. Figures, socio-political themes, satire.

Robert Hodgins left school in 1934, immigrated to South Africa in 1938, and enlisted in the Union Defence Forces (...

(b Cape Town, 1948).

South African painter, printmaker, curator, lecturer, and art critic. Jantjes graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, in 1969. Classified as coloured under apartheid and living a restricted life in South Africa, he accepted a scholarship in 1970 to study art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, graduating in 1972. A founder of the German anti-apartheid movement, Jantjes remained in Hamburg after his training. His artwork refers to the struggle against apartheid.

Jantjes’s best-known work, A South African Colouring Book (1974–5) is a vehement critique of apartheid. The series of 11 prints mimics a child’s colouring book as a means of criticizing apartheid’s race classification system. The print Classify this Coloured makes use of the artist’s own passbook, a required identity card for all coloureds and blacks. His hand-written text explains apartheid’s three racial classes—black, coloured, and white. The print Colour these People Dead...

Algerian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in France.

Born 25 January 1956, in Sfizef.

Painter (including gouache/mixed media), watercolourist, engraver. Scenes with figures, portraits, still-lifes, landscapes.

Djilali Kadid studied in Siddi Bel-Abbes and then from 1978 at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1983 and 1984...

South African, 21st century, collective of mostly women.

Needlework, painting, printmaking, ceramics. Local histories and scenes.

Established in 2000 by Carol Hofmeyr, an artist and medical doctor, the Keiskamma Art Project is intended to provide income-generating opportunities to isiXhosa-speakers in Hamburg and the surrounding villages of Bodium and Ntilini in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, while also enabling participants to use representation to engage with issues of relevance to their communities. Although members sometimes work individually on small-scale embroideries, items in felt, beaded objects, small prints, or ceramics, the project is best known for large-scale works in needlework, which its members work on collectively and which are parodies of well-known art objects from the West....

South African, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 28 April 1955, in Johannesburg.

Draughtsman, engraver, graphic designer, film producer, sculptor, theatre and opera designer and producer. Multimedia, animated films.

Land Art.

Although William Kentridge has practised his creativity in many domains and in a wide range of media (animated films, land art, sculpture, printmaking, theatre and opera design and production, installations), it is chiefly his large-scale charcoal drawings in process (drawing for animation) and his unique, short, animated films and their projection that have given him international fame....

South African, 20th–21st century, male.

Born June 5 1938, in Alexandra, Johannesburg.

Painter, draughtsman, watercolourist, printmaker.

One of South Africa’s prime art activists, David Koloane has been instrumental in making it conceptually and pragmatically possible for many black artists to reach critical prominence. He is also a painter who engages thoughtfully and aggressively with abstraction. Working in a diversity of approaches, he continues to break new ground....

Mauritian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 16 February 1948, in Mauritius.

Painter, pastellist, sculptor, screen printer.

Henry Koombes followed art courses in Cape Town. He lived there for several years, then returned to Mauritius in 1983. He uses acrylic like pastel to show a violently coloured 'lustful imagination'. He has appeared in various exhibitions, among which are: ...

Algerian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1947, in Ain-Beida.

Painter (mixed media), engraver, potter.

Koraichi studied at the school of fine art in Algiers, before continuing his education in Paris. He began as an engraver and practised calligraphy inspired by ethnic and then imaginary sources, which he transposed onto various materials such as wood, parchment, silk, and ceramic....

(b Aïn Beida, Jan 20, 1947).

Algerian painter and graphic artist. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, and in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ecole des Arts Décoratifs and Institut d’Urbanisme de l’Académie de Paris. After returning to Algeria he worked at the Bureau d’Etudes des Tanneries and the Bureaux d’Etudes des Textiles, and he then went to Tunisia, where he became cultural adviser at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Tunis. Inspired by the calligraphic movement in Arab painting in the 1960s, he explored the potential of abstract calligraphic compositions in graphic art to great effect (e.g. the engravings Testament of the Enemy, 1981) and also utilized such media as wood, silk, parchment and ceramics for this purpose, often with a minimal use of colour. Since 1970 he has exhibited his work in Europe, the Middle East, Japan, South America and the USA, and has won numerous awards.

Togolese, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 27 April 1972, in Lomé.

Painter (mixed media), engraver.

Through his painting, which he scrapes away or glues, Papisco Kudzi arrives at a personal vision of the world. He associates colours such as yellow ochre, black, blue and red with old jute cloth, scrap metal and garbage. But this artistic language has a spiritual message: 'Through my colours, what I am really talking about is the injustice of the world: yellow ochre reflects my roots; white signifies abundance of water and food; blue expresses a world without hope; black because everything is ephemeral and death lies after everything; red is the symbol of light and fire.' He has exhibited since ...