Goodman Gallery Cape Town 9 March – 15 April 2017
Acclaimed for an artistic practice that engages both materialist and conceptual thinking, Jeremy Wafer’s work is often visually situated in the field of abstraction and formalism, yet his concerns are coupled to his social-political, geographical and cultural context. In his exhibition Index, Jeremy Wafer’s sculptural installation is the principal medium in which the notions and implications of location, boundaries, and constructed borders are investigated.
Through a lens both personal and political, he offers revisions and reworkings of elements from previous bodies of work, which allows them to gain new meaning and different understandings through their relational context.
Artworks
About
Jeremy Wafer
Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953, Durban, South Africa) works across sculpture, photography, video and drawing, exploring the politics and poetics of place. Rooted in South Africa’s social, cultural and political geography, his work engages issues of land and territory, particularly themes of location, dislocation, possession and dispossession.
Wafer studied at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A Fine Art, 1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980, M.A. Fine Art 1987 and PhD, 2017). He has taught in the Fine Art Department of the Technikon Natal, Durban, and at the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he was appointed Professor of Fine Art in 2011.
Solo exhibitions include: Material Immaterial, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); Arc, Goodman Gallery, London (2022); Index, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2017); Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2014); Structure: Avenues and barriers of Power, a retrospective at KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009).
Group exhibitions include: Centre of Gravity, The Old Soap Works, Bristol (2020); Ampersand, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2019); Everywhere but Here, Cite International des Arts, Paris (2017); What remains is Tomorrow, The Pavilion of South Africa at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2015); Witness, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014); Views of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of Air and Space, Washington DC. (2013); and 20: Two Decades of South African Sculpture, NIROX Foundation, the Cradle of Humankind, (2010).
Wafer’s work features in the following public collections: the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC; South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
Wafer lives and works between London and Johannesburg.
Download full CV