Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953)
Springbok I
2004
mixed media on board
size unknown
BIOGRAPHY
Jeremy Wafer works across sculpture, photography, video and drawing, exploring the politics and poetics of place. Rooted in South Africa’s social, cultural and political geography, his work engages issues of land and territory, particularly themes of location, dislocation, possession and dispossession.
Born in Durban, Wafer studied at the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal), Pietermaritzburg (BA Fine Art, 1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand (BA Hons in Art History 1980, MA Fine Art 1987 and PhD, 2017). He has taught in the Fine Art Department of the Technikon Natal (now the Durban University of Technology) and at the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was appointed Professor of Fine Art in 2011.
Solo exhibitions include: Material Immaterial, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2023); Arc, Goodman Gallery, London (2022); Index, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2017); Structure: Avenues and barriers of power, a retrospective at KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2009).
Group exhibitions include: Centre of Gravity, The Old Soap Works, Bristol (2020); Ampersand, University of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg (2019); Everywhere but Here, Cité International des Arts, Paris (2017); What Remains is Tomorrow, The Pavilion of South Africa at the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2015); Witness, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014); Views of Africa, Smithsonian National Museum of Air and Space, Washington DC. (2013); and 20: Two Decades of South African Sculpture, NIROX Foundation, the Cradle of Humankind, (2010).
Wafer’s work features in the collections of the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC; the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, as well as in the SABC Art Collection.
Wafer lives and works between London and Johannesburg.