Artist Database

Morné Visagie was born in 1989 and is an artist, printmaker and curator who lives and works between Cape Town and Amsterdam. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art (2011) and Master of Fine Art (2019) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and is currently a PhD candidate at the European Graduate School. Visagie spent the first years of his life on Robben Island, where his father worked as a warder, and his practice is a sustained meditation on the sea as a physical and psychological landscape. Interweaving childhood memory with history, literature and film, he explores water, the swimming pool and the changing room as sites in queer literature and art, and more recently the histories of ocean crossings undertaken by those fleeing war and persecution. His abstracted works give primacy to colour and materiality. Solo exhibitions include shows at WHATIFTHEWORLD (2013, 2015, 2016), Fovntain at Smith (2018), Die Bloue Wis at Nuweland Gallery in the Netherlands (2018) and A Sinless Season at Everard Read, Cape Town (2023), and his work has also been shown at AKAA Paris, 1-54 London and Volta Basel.