Artists

Alice Elahi was born in Cape Town in 1926 and is well-known as a landscape artist, with a particular affinity for the Namibian landscape. As a teenager, she took lessons from Florence Zerffi at Rustenburg Girls High School and attended classes at the Frank Joubert Art Centre. While she completed a BSC at the University of Cape Town, her love of art led her to serve as the secretary of the University Art Society and helped to organise exhibitions. After graduating in 1948, Elahi attended the Continental School of Art in Cape Town, where she studied under Maurice van Essche and caught the attention of Irma Stern. The following year, she enrolled at the Anglo-French Art Centre in London and simultaneously took classes in stained glass at the Central School of Art and was tutored in painting by Victor Pasmore at the Camberwell. Elahi continued to broaden her studies at the Hampstead School of Art, where she was mentored by the Polish expressionist Zdzislaw Ruszkowski. She began exhibiting in the group shows of the Hampstead Art Society and the Women’s International Art Club.

Elahi married in 1954, and the couple, along with their two young daughters, settled in Pretoria in 1957; there she had two more daughters. In 1968, after a period of inactivity, Elahi entered and won the New Signatures competition. With this renewed encouragement, she continued to paint and exhibited regularly, including retrospective exhibitions at the University of Pretoria in 1988 and at the Pretoria Art Museum in 2015. She also had a travelling exhibition from late 2015 to early 2016 of her seascapes at the Irma Stern Gallery in Cape Town, the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch, and the William Humphreys Art Gallery in Kimberly.