TAF14 Artists

Adele Potgieter

Born in Witbank, Mpumalanga on 26 November 1974, Adele currently resides in Pretoria, Gauteng She has studied painting under Elizabeth Riding and has ongoing conceptual and technical guidance 
under Johan Conradie at Johan Conradie Art Academy. Adele is completing her BAVA degree at UNISA. Adele worked at Globe Gallery until 2014 when she resigned to follow her painting full time. Adele has exhibited extensively within the Gauteng area and more specifically in Pretoria. Adele recent interest in Still life as a genre has prompted a series of works in which she explores, in addition to illustrative concerns, the relationship between the value and function as well as the aesthetic qualities of objects. Each of these works focused on a single object that is of personal value to her. 

In her latest works I maintain a focus on the transcendence of function by incorporating aspects of the vanitas style in the selection and composition of objects. In addition, she explores the literal meaning of the word 'still': With similes such as quiet, calm, motionless and subdued in mind, the act of painting becomes a process of personal reflection and contemplation. 

Amita Makan 

Amita Makan was born in Port Elizabeth. She has a Masters’ Degree in International Relations. She holds a Diploma in Gender Policy and Planning from the University College London and a Cambridge Level Diploma in French. She was awarded Runner Up in SASOL New Signatures Competition, August 2009. Her first solo exhibition was held at KZNSA Gallery in 2010 and The Ron Belling Art Gallery in 2011. Her second solo ‘Nomalungelo: Threads To Freedom was curated by Brenton Maart and held at The Mess Hall, Constitution Hill and at Webber Wentzel, Johannesburg over March – April 2014. 

She is currently attending a Residency at the Cite International Des Arts in Paris, August and September 2014. Amita works are all hand embroidered, using cotton and saris from her late mother’s sari collection. This use of the sari references the past and heritage of her mother and Indian culture. The simple stitching repeated throughout the works is an enactment of her ancestral memory in relation to stitching practices. By using archival photographs as her starting point and bringing them into the contemporary, Amita demonstrates the free flow of influence between past and present, and shows that we can never be free from the histories that haunt us 

Angela Banks 

Angela Banks was born in Johannesburg. She now practices art from her home studio in Pretoria. In 1999 Banks graduated with a BA Fine Arts Degree, with Distinction, in painting, from the University of Pretoria. She then went on to obtain her MA (Fine Arts) in 2003 also from the University of Pretoria. She has since been on residencies in France and China which has afforded her the opportunity to experience European and Eastern art and has allowed her to exhibit internationally too. Angela is an artist who is deeply fascinated by both the reading into, as well as the creation of, a simulated individual’s identity within its society. Banks looks at icons, archetypes and stereotypes ideologically formed by social orders and pokes fun at the various masquerades that individual and society like to hide behind. Her more recent work focuses on how job title and position are used and abused as a means of intimidation, status and power within the society in which we live. It is about how a careful construction of character and contrived projection of self is utilised for personal, political or social gain. The daily masquerade or parade has become common place and is explored humorously in this body of work. Banks seeks out new technical avenues to represent this viewpoint and to compliment her 
realistic style of painting. 

Ann-Marie Tully

Ann-Marie Tully practices as a painter, also working with textile and ceramic media. She graduated cum laude with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2003, and has artworks in prestigious collections.Ann-Marie’s previous solo exhibitions include: Thimble Narratives (2003) at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; Non Facture (2007) at Gordart Gallery; and the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing exhibition, which debuted at NIROXprojects (2013), and is currently touring South Africa: the North-West University Galleries (2014), and the Oliewenhuis Museum (2015).Her artwork has been included in numerous local and international exhibitions. Ann-Marie has also curated a number of high profile thematic exhibitions including the ZOO (2013) exhibition at NIROXprojects; the Pointure (2012) exhibition at the University of Johannesburg Gallery; and the Urban Animal (2009) exhibition at the ABSA Gallery. She also practices as a published academic author, and is currently a Research Associate at the Research Centre, Visual Identities in Art and Design, at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg.Her concern for the lives of animals and the human/animal dialectic is central to her work.

Bernice Stott 

Bernice Stott has completed a post graduate degree in Drama which was followed by a Masters in Fine Arts at Durban University of Technology. She has been teaching in the Drama and Performance Studies Department (UKZN) for several years. Stott says that “Art making feeds my soul: it is a place of meditation yet it provides me with an engagement of both my internal and external life”.

Stott’s career has been centered on the human narrative and her intrigue with the female body in contemporary South Africa. Stott’s primary media are sculpture and painting, although Stott says that “photography has led me to into the media of
video and performance art”. She holds a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts.

These four paintings come from a body of work titled Litmus Skin. The Artist has used
a series of photographs evoking a childhood that seems mixed with horror and
delights. South African children charter potential hell realms of poverty,
dispossessions and abuses. In Litmus Skin red is primarily the colour of violence, blood,
passion, victimhood and wounding.


Bob Cnoops

Having been born in a mission hospital in Northern Transvaal, and then living closely with the local tribes until his mid-teens, Bob Cnoops was exposed to a multitude of traditional values, beliefs, stories and tribal practices. This was an important formative aspect of his life and has continued to be of importance even after living in an urban environment for the last four decades or so. Intrinsic in his work are the influences of Africa, surreal influences, he had taken in as a young boy and later as a grown man; a surreal African reality he is not totally comfortable with. The images thus reflect back on the hidden “surrealities” of the Self, his hidden African Self.


On a technical level, Cnoops personal work is all done on film. Analogue photography forces him to adopt a contemplative approach which suits his temperament very well. Cnoops does all of his own film processing and printing using the so-called Alternative Photographic Processes, i.e. antique and experimental processes. These processes work well with the imagery as they add to the sense of enigmatic surrealism he depicts. The prints are primarily done in the Van Dyke Brown, Cyanotype, and Gum-Oil Processes on textured water-colour paper. The texture adds another dimension to the reading of the photograph. The hand-made light-sensitive emulsions are hand-coated onto the paper. All of these processes have a high archival permanence value. 



Dominic Tshabangu 

Dominic Tshabangu was born on the 19th November 1965 in Dube Village in Soweto. He studied at Daliwonga High School in Dube and then part time at The Open School (1983-1984) in Johannesburg, under the guidance of Mr. Philip Maulumise and Vincent Baloyi. Between 1985 and 1989, Tshabangu studied art part time with The African Institute of Art, Funda Centre, Soweto, an arts centre in Johannesurg, one of the very few places to study painting under Apartheid. The imagery which Dominic collages are scenes which he has scene during his lifetime living in Dube, Soweto. These images range from scenes of the streets, markets, the ordinary people and the shebeens. While his choice of subject matter was shaped while living in the township, his skill and training was taught at Funda, an arts centre in Johannesburg, one of the very few possibilities under Apartheid to study painting. There he qualified as a teacher. After winning the Bertrams V.O. Art of Africa Award he was offered a studio in the famous Bag factory in Newtown/Johannesburg. Currently, Tshabangu practices art in his Fordsburg studio. 
Tshabangu captures the daily life and historical events in a journalistic manner. In the 
collage paintings he uses pictures and pages from magazines and includes found 
objects like cloth and corrugated card board to create dimension and texture. The 
works have a mosaic atmosphere and are quite colourful. The works tells short 
stories: scenes from the illegal bars; shebeen queen, how hostel dwellers have to live 
and how hard work gives little reward. Tshabangu believes he is capturing the history of his era for the coming generations to understand, making the work accessible to the viewer. 

Gina Waldman 


Gina Waldman is a mixed media artist who completed her Masters in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2003. Her mixed media work explores notions of kitsch, excess, collecting, consumerism, taste and decorating. Gina’s works recall the very Victorian trend of curiosity cabinets and pinning down ‘valuable’ specimens to perhaps show off these treasured finds and to preserve them for posterity. She lives and works in Johannesburg as an artist, stylist and designer. 


Henk Serfontein

Henk Serfontein’s paintings have received widespread acclaim. He holds a degree in Fine Art (cum laude) and has studied at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. He has lectured art at tertiary level, adjudicated national art competitions and is an accomplished curator of exhibitions.
In 2010, his work was selected as one of 26 finalists for the prestigious international Gausch Coranty Painting Award and exhibition held in Barcelona, Spain. He was also invited in 2011 to become the international resident artist at the Piramidon Centre of Contemporary Art in Barcelona for three months.

In his recent still life paintings, Henk Serfontein deconstructs the work of the colonial explorer Thomas Baines. In the paintings he juxtapose reproductions of Thomas Baines paintings with everyday South African objects that relate to trade and trade routes. The works make stylistic references to historical Trompe l'oeil paintings. He draws our attention in a post-colonial context to issues such as the effect the Dutch East India Company's trade had on Africa. He explores issues such as the exploitation of the indigenous population, the distribution of wealth through natural resources and therefore the impact of colonization on Africa.


Hermann Niebuhr 

Born in Johannesburg in 1972, Niebuhr graduated from Rhodes University in 
Grahamstown and spent six years in the Karoo before returning to Johannesburg to 
focus on urban landscapes. He has exhibited widely in South Africa as well as in the 
U.S, UK, Germany, and Ireland. His work is held in private and corporate collections 
at home and abroad. Niebuhr currently divides his time between his studios in 
Fordsburg and the Klein Karoo. 

Niebuhr re-captures places that have been abandoned or forgotten or reviled, and 
shows how these places actually do belong in the spectrum of our reality. 

The imagery which Niebuhr creates are filled with a sense of disturbance and 
violence, they become imbued with a poetic sense of spirit which is both beautiful and sinister. 

Jacki McInnes 


McInnes obtained a BA (FA) (cum laude) from University of South Africa (UNISA) in 
2001 and an MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 
2004. She received the UNISA Fine Arts Faculty medal in 2001 and won the ‘Mixed 
Media’ category prize in the M-Web New Signatures Competition in 2000. She was 
awarded a National Arts Council scholarship in 2003, and was selected for the ‘Pro 
Helvetia Arts Council of Switzerland Artist’s Residency’ programme in 2004. 

McInnes lives and works in Johannesburg and is a Research Associate at the 
Research Centre: Visual Identities in Art and Design at the University of 
Johannesburg. McInnes interrogates the global culture and its relationship to the destruction of our surroundings and earth. Her current work interrogates the contradictions inherent in 
present-day human thought and behaviour, especially with respect to the 
disconnect between our material aspirations, rampant consumerism and wasteful 
practices and their inevitable effect on our planet and ultimate future. 

Key areas of interest relate to the forces of attraction and repulsion and, secondarily, 
to the speed at which we hurtle resolutely on our chosen trajectory into an uncertain 
future. A leit motif of the effect exerted by the magnetic field runs through her work 
speaking to the concepts of the loss of our societal moral compass and to the binary 
opposing forces to which we are subjected: nature on nature; man on nature; man on man, and inevitably, nature on man.

James Oatway 


James Oatway (b.1978) is a South African photojournalist based in Johannesburg. 

He graduated from Rhodes University in Grahamstown in 1999 with a Bachelor of 
Journalism degree. In 2000 he began working as a newspaper photographer. He is 
currently a Senior Photographer at the Sunday Times. 

In 2014 Oatway was placed 2nd in the “Newspaper Photographer of the Year” 
category at the 71st Pictures of the Year International (POYi) competition – one of 
international Photojournalism’s premier awards. Some of his winning pictures form 
part of an exhibition at the Newseum in Washington DC, which will run until October 
2014. Oatway has been assigned on stories around the world. Democratic Republic of 
Congo, Central African Republic, Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip, Haiti and Zimbabwe 
are some of the notable places he has worked. 
He teaches Documentary Photography on a part-time basis at the Market Photo 
Workshop in Johannesburg. 
“The images I photograph are my personal observations of the realities I encounter 
while on my travels for work. As a photojournalist I feel that it is my job to present the various realities of life. 
As humans we sometimes pretend not to notice things that disturb us. I want these 
images to allow the viewer a moment to pause and observe and reflect.”


Jenny Marcus 


Jenny Marcus was born in Johannesburg, South Africa and still lives and works there. She paints and is actively involved in her local community as a social worker amongst other things. She runs a shop, 'The Lamp Post', in Norwood where she hosts fortnightly ‘Art Jams’ with fellow artists and friends. Jenny has attended painting classes with Greg Kerr for many years. 

Jenny began painting as a "mature student" not having had art classes at school or in her tertiary studies. She paints in her kitchen, her shop, in the garden and in workshops. She particularly enjoys reading about art and the philosophy of art. 

Jenny is interested in the active line making during the creation process. Her subject matter ranges from the everyday domestic scenes to people she encounters. Her 
drawings and paintings show a whimsical exploration of the things around us, often doused with a sense of humour. 

Leanne Shakenovsky

Leanne Shakenovsky was born in 1986 in Johannesburg, South Africa. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree (honours) from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2008. Following this, she spent time in London and worked on cruise ships as an art associate for Park West Gallery. On her return to Johannesburg in 2011, Leanne began working as a cataloguer and junior paintings specialist for Strauss and Co-Fine Art Auctioneers and consultants. This greatly informed her art practice. Leanne left Strauss and Co in May 2013 in order to pursue her career as an artist. She has exhibited in several group shows and a solo show and presently lives in Johannesburg where she works from her Assemblage studio in Newtown.

Leanne is currently working on various projects, although glitter remains her primary medium.Shakenovsky challenges notions of financial value ascribed to artworks as well as the constructed concept of the “perfect family”, she questions the idea of worth on a monetary and familial level. 

Liebner Anthony van Zyl 

Liebner-Anthony van Zyl was born on the third of April 1985 in Potchefstroom in what 
is now known as Northwest Province in the Republic of South Africa. 
He matriculated from John Vorster Technical High School in Pretoria in 2004. After a 
short sabbatical he enrolled for a diploma in Fine Arts at the Tshwane University of 
Technology and completed his studies in 2011. 

“As a child I had to overcome a lot of physical afflictions. I spent a lot of time in 
various hospitals undergoing tests and being operated on. In my teens they 
discovered that I had Asperger Syndrome – a mild form of autism. 
One thing that it has taught me is that reality is by nature fractured – a fact that is 
strongly reflected in my work. Art has however, also afforded me the opportunity to 
transcend my personal circumstances and to rediscover my lighter side. 
As a black-and-white type of person, I prefer to use monotone colours when I paint. 
It reflects my particular window on the world – and how I prefer to deal with life in 
general. "I like painting faces, because faces reflect the human condition as I see and 
experience it.” 

Matt Kay 

Matthew Kay was born on the 22nd of December 1985. 
After completing matric in 2003 he worked as a professional sailor and freelance skipper until 2009. Returning to South Africa in 2010 he attended the intermediate 
and advanced Photography courses at the Market Photo workshop, 2011/2012. He is 
currently employed as a trainer at the Market Photo Workshop. 

Matt Kay has entered many art competitions and awards over the few years he has been a practicing artist, in 2014 Kay looks forward to the Tierney Fellowship Award. 

Exhibitions 
Sasol Young Signatures, group show – Pretoria Art museum (2012) 
“Shoot to kill“ Group Show, Kalashnikovv Gallery- Braamfontein (2013) 
“The Garden” – Tokara , group show, Stellenbosch (2013) 
“Expressions of Freedom” Group show - Constitutional Hill, curated by the 
Kalashnikovv Gallery (2013) “My Joburg: Short Change “ Group show - La Maison Rouge Galley – Paris 
(2013) 
 
Kay’s work centers on the idea of intuition as the driving force behind taking 
photographs. The imagery is connected through the act of looking and shooting on 
impulse. This is not to say that the photographs are random, far from it. Rather the 
images are connected together through a practiced way of seeing. It is the play 
between intuition and construct within photography that interests Kay. 


Michael Meyersfeld 

Michael Meyersfeld lives and works in Johannesburg South Africa. 
Fascinated with image making from the age of six, he began taking pictures with a 
baby brownie camera, and spent every available moment making contact prints 
under the stairwell of his home. 

His schooling was at King Edward VII Preparatory and High Schools, and he then 
went on to do a degree in commerce at the University of the Witwatersrand, after 
which he joined the family steel business. 

The Camera Club of Johannesburg introduced him to the world of art photography and during those years he won many prizes at the numerous International Photo Salons. 

His work is notable for its stark, sometimes sombre, lonely and edgy imagery that has 
separateness from reality. His more recent work involves the staging of people in 
structured scenes portraying mans' emotional and behavioural patterns. 

Meyersfeld is not comfortable being drawn into giving explanations. His titles are 
deliberately obtuse nudging the viewer to uncover what memory or emotion that 
particular image has stirred in them, moving them to reflect, and respond in their 
own personal world. 

These are not random photographs. Each image is planned, sculpted, and directed 
to the point where the desired tension is achieved. Meyersfeld has won numerous 
awards, the most recent being a Gold at the London AOP Awards. 

Paul Emmanuel 

Born in 1969 in Kabwe, Zambia, Emmanuel graduated from the University of the 
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 1993. In 1997, The Ampersand Foundation made 
him the first recipient of the prestigious Ampersand Fellowship, which afforded him a 
three-month residency in New York. His first solo show in 2000 at the Open Window 
Gallery, Pretoria, South Africa was followed by three subsequent solo exhibitions in 
the Western Cape and Johannesburg in 2003 – 2005. In 2002 he was awarded first 
prize for AIR ON THE SKIN in the Sasol Wax in Art Competition, Sasolburg, South Africa. 

Emmanuel employs various media, including photography and film to reveal layered 
visions concerned with his identity as a young white male living in post-apartheid 
South Africa. 

In 2004 Phase 1 of his series of unique, ephemeral, outdoor installations, THE LOST 
MEN was launched on the Grahamstown National Arts Festival main visual arts 
programme to public acclaim. In 2007 Phase 2 of this project took place in Maputo, 
Mozambique. Phase 3, THE LOST MEN FRANCE will be installed adjacent to the 
Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, France in 2014 as an intervention in 
the Somme Circuit of Remembrance and will be an official event of the World War 
One Centenary. 

Emmanuel lives and works in Johannesburg

Rosemarie Marriott 

Rosemarie Marriott was born and grew up on a farm in the Kuruman district, 
Northern Cape, South Africa. She obtained a BA Degree from UNISA (1974) and an 
Advanced Diploma (Fine Arts) from the University of the Witwatersrand, 
Johannesburg(1996). 

Rosemarie Marriott has had numerous solo exhibitions since 1986 and has also 
participated in group exhibitions. Her work can be found in private, public and 
corporate collections in South Africa and abroad. 

A paramount force in her art making practice is the combined act of collecting 
material such as animal skin or parts (from taxidermists and local farms) and the 
visceral transformation of that material into often tender or startling new forms. 

Marriott’s intuitive responses to the specific tactility, texture and colour of chosen 
material (skins, bones etc.) dictates how far the material can be manipulated and 
transformed. Inchoate ideas develop through working in a labour-intensive way, 
recognising the potency of the dead animal and realising a new sculptural 
incarnation from that close proximity and touch. 

The redemptive quality of giving renewed life to dead or discarded objects is a 
primary motivation in her work. 

She lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Tanisha Bhana 



A self-trained contemporary South African visual artist and Poet, Tanisha is a 
recipient of various merit awards in South Africa and has published a monograph 
with ArtCo Publishing in Germany. She has exhibited at solo and group exhibitions in 
Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, East London, Namibia, New York, Paris, 
Netherlands, Germany and North Carolina (2012 – 2014) and her works are 
represented at private and corporate collections. 
She has also displayed her work at economic and climate leadership conferences in 
Johannesburg (2012) as well as at performance-dialogues by poet and activist, Dr. 
Rama Mani, on ‘War, Women and the Human Spirit’, at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 
Canada and on ‘The Art of Hospitality’ for World Refugee Day in Istanbul, Turkey 
(2014). 
Her photography is often taken in naturally challenging environments, multi-layered 
and broken down through digital media and interposed with misplaced objects, 
each paradoxically symbols of both hope and despair, offering different meanings 
to imaginary landscapes. 

Influenced by her profession as an attorney in the financial services global markets 
industry, her connection to her ancient heritage, and projects in marginalized 
communities in South Africa, she claims to act as a medium for the places that we 
inhabit and would like her works to be a ‘mirror that will remain when our footprints 
fade’ 

Wilma Cruise 


Wilma Cruise is a South African sculptor and visual artist. Working mainly with fired clay on a life size scale she has had fifteen solo exhibitions, curated others and 
completed a number of public works including the national monument to the women of South Africa and the memorial to the enslaved in Cape Town (the latter in 
collaboration with Gavin Younge). Her work is represented in public, corporate and private collections throughout South Africa. Wilma Cruise uses the body as the vehicle for the exploration of meaning. The body provides the metaphorical link between unconscious realities and the conscious known world. Her sculptures are rendered in expressive life-size figures in bronze and ceramic which in recent years have included animals such as horses and sheep. She has produced a body of work on paper that incorporates the figure, animals and text. 

Gordon Froud 
 
Gordon Froud has been actively involved in the South African and international art 
world as artist, educator, curator and gallerist for the last 30 years. He has shown on 
hundreds of solo and group shows in South Africa and overseas and has served on 
many arts committees throughout South Africa. He has judged many of the 
important Art competitions from local to national levels in South Africa. 
 
Froud graduated with BA (FA) Hons from the University of Witwatersrand in 1987, 
Higher Education diploma from the same university in 1987 and a masters degree in 
Sculpture from the University of Johannesburg in 2009 where he runs the sculpture 
department as a senior lecturer. He has taught continuously at school and tertiary 
level in South Africa and in London since 1990. He directed gordart Gallery in 
Johannesburg from 2003 to 2009 showcasing work by new, upcoming artists. He 
shows on more than 20 exhibitions a year. 
 
With a vast array of works in different mediums, including: bronze casts, ceramic 
plates, artist’s books, photography, digital printing, etching, linocut, wood carving 
and drawing amongst others. Froud’s work maintains common threads of humor 
and found objects as the recognizable ‘hand’ of the artist. 


Justin Dingwall 
 
Justin Dingwall is a successful commercial, as well as a fine art, photographer. Dingwall started his career in commercial photography after graduating with a 
BTech Cum Laude in Photography from the Tswane University of Technology in 2004. During the next few years he won numerous awards, including gold in the Fuji Film 
Awards for portraiture. His work has been published both locally and internationally.His most recent project, a series of beautiful composed portraits of Thando Hopa (a young lawyer-turned-model who has albinism) has attracted 
attention internationally. 

He continues his journey of self-discovery through his lens… 
“I do what I do for the love of new experiences. My imagery is not bound by language or culture. I want my work to speak for itself and for people to interpret it in their own way. I want people to be affected by my images... As long as someone is feeling something, I am achieving my goals.”