Notes

"In my work, time and space appear to dissolve, and an air of conflict erupts. This is often a direct result of a personal aim to calm and disturb at the same time – drawing parallels between the two extremes of utopia and dystopia. There is always a secondary narrative in my work. The primary narrative has symbolic authority and aesthetic promise, although the mysterious secondary narrative exists in order to provoke thought in the viewer.

In many ways I aim to ‘rewrite’ history in my work and the dominant sense of self-awareness that informs most Western art practices. I am trying to present contemporary issues such as Difference as timeless, by situating my vocabulary of images and themes in an organic flux of dreams, history, news, commercial detritus, hyper-reality, and unvoiced feelings and forces of biological nature/desire." –Christiaan Diedericks

Christiaan Diedericks graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Potchefstroom and completed his Master's in Fine Arts at the University of Pretoria in 2000. Diedericks has exhibited extensively throughout Southern Africa, as well as in the USA, Japan, Germany, England and Sweden. In 2006, he was the winner of the Kanna Award for Fine Arts at the ABSA KKNK festival in Oudtshoorn for his exhibition Secrets and Lies: Her Majesty's Ivory Tower. He worked as an artist in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. After receiving the prestigious Ampersand Foundation Fellowship in 2007, in New York, where his work was exhibited at the gallery 5+5 in Brooklyn to critical acclaim. 

This text is adapted from the artist’s website http://chrisdiedericks.co.za/about/

Provenance

Donated by Samantha Balsdon.