Hentie van der Merwe

Stains of the Landscape

The medium of oil paint on canvas and photography is central to my practice. It is the means by which I think and feel - the vehicle I use to daily renew and deepen my own explorations of my psyche, desires and emotions, as well the ideas that interest me. My work is autobiographical by nature. The body, often the male body, and landscape, are prominent motifs in my work, while History and the archive are recurring themes. 

My current paintings employ landscape as motif, and are all based on early 20th-century South African and Namibian colonial landscape paintings by white male Afrikaans artists such as Tinus de Jongh, W.H. Coetzer, J.E.A. Volschenk and Erich Mayer. In my approach to these paintings I take my queue from the likes of W.J.T. Mitchell who argues for “landscape” not as a noun, but a verb, not as an object to be seen but rather a process whereby social and subjective identities are formed - “landscape” as an “instrument of cultural power” (Landscape and power, 2002). In a colonial context, as is the case with the above-mentioned paintings, “landscape” indicates a process whereby specific social subjectivities were pushed to the centre of public discourse (white, heterosexual, male) while others (colonised, black) were marginalised. Such paintings also served to resolve white ownership of colonised land, similar to the landscape paintings by the Hudson River school artists during the mid-19th-century in America. 

The reason for using the above-mentioned paintings as departure point in my own work is that I myself is white, male and Afrikaans, and it is thus of importance to my own investigations into my own (queer) identity that I busy myself with such works that played such a pivotal historical role in shaping Afrikaner identity.   

Hentie van der Merwe lives and works in Darling in the Western Cape, South Africa. He was born in Windhoek, Namibia and studied fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand where he obtained both his bachelors and masters degrees. Between 2000 and 2002 he attended the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Antwerp and in 2001 he won a scholarship to attend the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, USA. He has had several solo exhibitions in both South Africa and Europe (Tim van Laere Gallery, Antwerp in 2003 and 2005; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg in 2000, 2003 and 2008; and Galerie Gabriele Rivet, Cologne in 2003 and 2004). He has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions both in South Africa and internationally, some of which were curated by acclaimed international curators such as Jan Hoet (My Private Heroes, MARTa Herford, Germany, 2005) and Okwui Enwezor (Snap Judgements: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, International Center of Photography, New York, 2006). In 2002 he won the prize for best visual artist at the BIG Torino 2002 International Biennale of Young Art curated by Michelangelo Pistoletto and in 2008 the Sasol Wax Art Award, the most prestigious award in South Africa for professional artists