​Contemporary South African Art

Nel Erasmus

 

Nel Erasmus (born 1928 in Bethal, Transvaal Province, South Africa) explores energies as they play through horses, flowers and human bodies to name a few. Central to her work is also the observation of the relationship of energies which are opposing forces, such as the two sides of the body and the bond between those two sides.

 

Nel Erasmus says, “I am happiest when heart and head seem to walk a tightrope on the canvas – where feeling and thought seem to be in tension. For me these two sometimes manage to contain me and my shadow, my heart and my head…”

 

Erasmus studied at the Académie Ranson, Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Sorbonne in Paris in 1953 and exhibited her works for the first time in Paris in 1955. Her first solo exhibition was in South Africa in 1957 and she is one of the earliest abstract artists of South Africa. Erasmus has produced thirty solo exhibitions, taken part in more than seventy group exhibitions and her writing has been widely published. Although Erasmus was never a ‘popular’ painter, her work received much critical acclaim and she was the only South African artist to be included in Michel Seuphor’s 1964 survey of abstraction, Abstract Painting: 50 Years of Accomplishment.

Three other South Africans who spent time with Erasmus in Paris in the early 1950s and who appeared to have been inspired by the intuitive processes of post-war abstract painting in Paris were Christo Coetzee, Paul du Toit, and Eric Loubser.

 

Nel Erasmus was an early proponent of Abstract Art in South Africa – both as a practice and a principle. Erasmus also influenced the South African art scene as director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) (1966–1977).

The New Church Museum curator Marilyn Martin, who curated the Museum's Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart exhibition, describes Erasmus' abstract content through two of her works, Space Dance II and Whirlwind, which are both characterised by brightly coloured forms in flux. Martin says, “The time bound object dissolves and reshapes itself into symbols, images and signs, which it actually and secretly contains within itself. These signs can point more directly towards the essence of a thing, its energy; its relatedness to things other than itself."

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nel_Erasmus