JANE ALEXANDER (b. 1959)
By the end of today you’re going to need us
1985
photomontage
edition 6/25
28 x 19 cm
Landscape
1985
photomontage
edition 12/25
26 x 26 cm
Phone Me for Secret
1995
photomontage
edition 6/12
14.5 x 23 cm
Seminar
2001
digital ink print on cotton paper
edition 3/20
29.5 x 40 cm
Text extract from monograph published in 2002 when Jane Alexander won the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Contemporary Sculpture:
Somewhere between realism and metaphor, humanity and bestiality, South Africa and the rest of the world, Alexander’s sculptures give shape to the brutal, painful, tragic, bizarre, incomprehensible, and fragile existence of her multicultural society – and, to a lesser extent, others. Existing in a no-man’s-land where the difference between victim and perpetrator is blurred and meaningless… Continue Reading
BIOGRAPHY
Working in figurative sculpture, photography and video, Jane Alexander examines imbalances of power using eerie imagery.
Alexander gained prominence early in her career for the work Butcher Boys (1985–86), a seated trio of nude, mutilated, hybrid creatures made while she was studying at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Created during a year of protest and violence under apartheid, the sculpture has been widely exhibited, including at the 1994 Havana Biennial and the 1995 Venice Biennale.
Alexander has continued to produce cryptic, provocative, part-human, part-animal, part-monster figures, inviting conversations on the dichotomies between vulnerability and aggression, apathy and action.
In 2013, a major traveling exhibition organised by the Museum for African Art in New York homed in on the site-specific aspect of Alexander’s practice, underscoring the universality and mutability of her ultimate subject matter: the human condition.