Artists

Wim Botha grew up near Pretoria and studied at the University of Pretoria and his works sometimes draws on his experience of the capital city’s particular character although he now lives in the Cape province. He works with associations between familiar, everyday objects and supposedly universal ideas, transforming material in ways that reflect its origins, but make other transgressive statements. Paper, an ordinary inexpensive substance, can communicate powerful ideas in Botha’s carved stacks of compressed found texts, such as government gazettes or other official documents, that he transforms into wildlife hunting trophies or religious figures, for example. The monumental Christ-like figure carved from stacked bibles in his Commune: Suspension of Disbelief installation, first displayed at the KKNK festival in 2001 and now in the Johannesburg Art Gallery, is regarded as one of his most iconic works.

For his sixth solo exhibition at Stevenson, Linear Perspectives (2014), Botha created three installations, in three different rooms, using a mix of traditional long-lasting art materials as well as fragile consumer products, including oil paint, bronze, marble, polystyrene and cardboard. Other solo exhibitions have been Predictions, at the Kunstraum in Innsbruck, Austria (2013) and Solipsis V, at the Sasol Art Museum, Stellenbosch, as part of the artist’s role as Stellenbosch University’s Woordfees Artist for the year 2013. Botha’s work has also featured on international group exhibitions including The Rainbow Nation, in the Museum Beelden aan Zee, The Hague (2012), and Imaginary Fact: South African Art and the Archive in the South African Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.

Botha won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for visual art in 2005, and the Helgaard Steyn Prize for sculpture in 2013 for his artwork Blastwave, displayed in public at Nedbank’s Johannesburg headquarters.