Bettie CILLIERS-BARNARD (1914 – 2010)
Deur My Venster
1965
oil on canvas
45 x 75.5 cm
Eureka
1981 – 1990
mixed media on paper
46 x 51 cm
Mensegroep
1972
oil on canvas
size unknown
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Rustenburg in the North West Province, Bettie Cilliers-Barnard was a an abstract artist, generally known for her large canvases of birds in flight.
She started painting in the late 1930s and furthered her art studies by travelling to Antwerp in Belgium, attending the Opsomer School in 1948, and then studying under André Lhote in Paris. Between 1956 and 1981, she returned to Europe many times, studying in Paris under Stanley Hayter and working in the Parisian graphic workshop of Jean-Paul Pons.
She explored the abstract principles of light, shade and contrast as metaphors in her works and, in the late 1950s – along with Douglas Portway, Joan Clare and Nel Erasmus – became one of South Africa’s earliest abstract painters.
Many of her abstract compositions incorporate circles, a shape that references the sun, the source of her exploration of light. In the 1970s, birds unexpectedly started appearing in her work. She referred to these works as her ‘flights of the spirit’.
Her tapestries, paintings and murals in oils were commissioned for public collections and museum and private collections in South Africa and abroad. She painted Vision for the Pretoria Eye Institute (1992), Flight for South African Airwways (1983), the tapestry Guardian Angel of the Arts for the State Theatre in Pretoria (1981), and her mural in oils Mens sana corpore sano for the Department of Health in Pretoria (1980).
From 1946 onwards, Cilliers-Barnard’s works were shown in 70 solo exhibitions in South Africa as well as internationally.
In his 1996 book on her life and work, art historian Prof Muller Ballot writes: ‘Her reaching out to esoteric horizons, to the boundaries of time and space, which have fascinated her from an early stage, still seeks fulfilment in the symbolic values of the human figure. Sometimes these occur with, for example, strange alien beings, primeval animal forms, arrows and sharp triangular shapes.’
She was the mother of well-known South African actress Jana Cilliers.