Artist Database

David Brown is best known for his metal sculptures of human figures orchestrated into allegorical tableaus. Suggestive of carnivals and ritualised combat, his speculative scenes offer barbed commentary on late-apartheid South African life. Brown’s dystopian vision, which he elaborated with anachronistic fashions and analogue technologies, is in the current vernacular pure steampunk. A graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art, where he studied design and photography, Brown was persuaded to pursue sculpture in 1975 by his father-in-law, artist Cecil Skotnes. He initially produced wooden totems, but in 1980 exhibited dogs carved from Jarrah, an Australian hardwood, clothed with metal jackets. Brown started to work in bronze in 1984. Brown drew inspiration for these dystopian allegories from the scenes he observed at his Woodstock studio, from which he witnessed the demolition of District Six and often saw camouflaged policemen gather before their sorties into townships with their armoured vehicles.

Sean O’Toole