Johan THOM (b. 1976)
Outpost II
2004
framed Lambda Print
127.5 x 150 cm
Godverdomme
2008
monoprint
70 x 100 cm
Bloodless War
2008
monoprint
100 x 70 cm
The Second General
2008
monoprint
edition 1/1
70 x 100 cm
BIOGRAPHY
Johan Thom obtained his BA in Fine Art from the University of Pretoria (1999), MTech in Fine Arts from Tshwane University of Technology (2002) and achieved his PhD in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art in London (2014). He currently lives in Pretoria and works as a visual artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the Department of Visual Art, University of Pretoria.
Thom works across a variety of media, including sculpture, video, drawing, printmaking and photography. His research focus is on materiality and he draws on a broad range of theoretical frameworks that include evolutionary approaches to art-making and post-phenomenological, performative approaches to the body and its identity.
Thom is also one of South Africa’s foremost performance artists. He uses his own body and physical objects as the site of exploration and expression. Created in various public urban contexts as well as in museums and galleries, his works draw on his daily experience of life in South Africa, as well as from distinctly different cultural traditions and philosophies.
In 2024, Nirox Foundation presented Grasp, a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Thom, exploring the material relationship between the tactile, time, and (negative) space. The exhibition was structured in two parts, split across two venues.
Held in Nirox’s residency workshop, part one included Time after Time (2023), an installation in which an automated brick and bronze skull constantly rotated, narrowly missing each other. Across the road, at the Kromdraai Impact Hub, Thom presented three new works: Will you still be mine? (The weight of body in ice), a large photograph documenting his performance at Casa Wabi, Mexico, earlier in 2024; Dwell (the weight of my body as a brick), produced in collaboration with Modern Art Projects South Africa (MAPSA); and LH+RH+LHRH (Grasp), a major installation of over a thousand individual clay forms.
Other selected solo exhibitions include: Things Appear & Disappear, Kalashnikovv Gallery, Johannsburg (2023); The devil made me do it, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2015); and
The Animal Series 2013 – 2014 (featuring collaborations with Willem Boshoff, Diane Victor,
David Koloane, Guy Du Toit and Bevan De Wet, Nirox Projects, Johannesburg (2014).