Vivienne Koorland
PEGASUS, 2021
Oil paint, printed roadmap from 1960, on stitched linen and burlap
213.5 x 249 cm
84 1/8 x 98 1/8 in
84 1/8 x 98 1/8 in
Copyright The Artist
South African artist Vivienne Koorland’s hand-hewn, habitually recycled paintings – along with her maps, poems, songs and stories – explore the vexed problematic of language and the impossibility of narrative...
South African artist Vivienne Koorland’s hand-hewn, habitually recycled paintings – along with her maps, poems, songs and stories – explore the vexed problematic of language and the impossibility of narrative in painting. Eschewing conventional objective painting practice on the one hand, and pure abstraction on the other, her representations on linen and stitched burlap of highly acculturated kitsch images of plants and animals, words, musical notes and quotations address the contested terrain of collective experience through overdetermined revisions of history, while trafficking in the tropes that signify them. Regarding herself as a de-skilled ‘History Painter’ whose project is subverting prevailing constructions of history, in a collision of accident and purpose where no trace is deemed too insignificant, she re-makes drawings, fragments and markings by often deracinated forgotten persons or unwitting artists into monumental paintings as an act of triumph and validation over rupture, ruin and annihilation.
Her painting Pegasus, flies between a 1960s map of Table Mountain in South Africa, a 2021 headline and an 18th century drawing of the logo for NSO Group, a black listed Israeli surveillance firm. Tropes are stitched together through the threaded filter of colonialism. The thin lines illustrating Table Mountain and a row of colorful flowers indigenous to the southern cape of South Africa stand in for an idea of home as mythology, branding and social upheaval collide in an organized stream of memories, unpaved roads and the seeds beneath them. Part memory, part affirmation, Koorland’s painting is an act of resistance and survival.
Vivienne Koorland (South African, b.1957) lives and works in New York City. She earned her BFA in 1978 from the University of Cape Town and her MFA from the Universität der Künste Berlin in 1982. She also studied at the École Nationale Superièure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She earned a second MFA from Columbia University in New York in 1984. Her work reflects her experience growing up under Apartheid and is highly influenced by the philosophy of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School. She has been a visiting artist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kent Gallery in New York, NY, the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, and Toomey-Tourell Fine Art in San Francisco, CA, Other prominent exhibitions include ‘William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letters and Lines,’ Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2017); ‘Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism,’ The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, USA (2011); ‘HomeLands / LandMarks: Contemporary Art from South Africa,’ Haunch of Venison, London, UK (2008); ‘Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes),’ The Freud Museum, London, UK (2007); and ‘Contents, Songbooks and Other Paintings,’ College of Staten Island, New York, NY, USA (2004).
Her painting Pegasus, flies between a 1960s map of Table Mountain in South Africa, a 2021 headline and an 18th century drawing of the logo for NSO Group, a black listed Israeli surveillance firm. Tropes are stitched together through the threaded filter of colonialism. The thin lines illustrating Table Mountain and a row of colorful flowers indigenous to the southern cape of South Africa stand in for an idea of home as mythology, branding and social upheaval collide in an organized stream of memories, unpaved roads and the seeds beneath them. Part memory, part affirmation, Koorland’s painting is an act of resistance and survival.
Vivienne Koorland (South African, b.1957) lives and works in New York City. She earned her BFA in 1978 from the University of Cape Town and her MFA from the Universität der Künste Berlin in 1982. She also studied at the École Nationale Superièure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She earned a second MFA from Columbia University in New York in 1984. Her work reflects her experience growing up under Apartheid and is highly influenced by the philosophy of Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School. She has been a visiting artist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kent Gallery in New York, NY, the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, and Toomey-Tourell Fine Art in San Francisco, CA, Other prominent exhibitions include ‘William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland: Conversations in Letters and Lines,’ Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2017); ‘Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism,’ The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, USA (2011); ‘HomeLands / LandMarks: Contemporary Art from South Africa,’ Haunch of Venison, London, UK (2008); ‘Reisemalheurs (Travel Woes),’ The Freud Museum, London, UK (2007); and ‘Contents, Songbooks and Other Paintings,’ College of Staten Island, New York, NY, USA (2004).