Artist Database

Initialy a member of the famous Wits Group of artists, abstract artist Christo Coetzee left South Africa for the United Kingdom in the early 1950s. The late 1950s found him in Japan, studying with the Gutai group of post WWII avant-garde artists. He travelled to Paris, via New York, where he worked in the early 1960s. After a brief sojourn in Spain, Coetzee returned to South Africa in 1969. He is most famous for slashing his canvases during the opening of an exhibition in Cape Town in 1975 and then subsequently reassembling the pieces in a phenomenally creative manner.