Karlien de Villiers
Born 1975, lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa
The characters and creatures that inhabit de Villiers’ paintings and drawings are all caught between conflicting emotions. The awkwardness of gender and sex intermingling with anxiety, desire, cruelty and a sense of longing and displacement, create complex phantasmagorical dreamscapes. The often playful whimsy seems to be frivolously at odds with something threatening and unheimlich lurking somewhere beneath the surface or behind the scenes. A palpable sense of doom meets colourful comic art and an off-beat sense of humor.
De Villiers wants her work to take viewers on a trip into the dark subconscious nooks and crannies of the post-feminist 21st century.
Sovereign Art Foundation African Art Prize 2011 Top 20 finalist. UNESCO/Aschberg residency at the Instituto Sacatar, in Itaparica, Brazil (October - December 2011).