Kay HASSAN (b. 1956)

BIOGRAPHY

Kay Hassan was born in Alexandra township. His mother brewed traditional beer at a shebeen, defying apartheid laws and repeated raids by police. His cousin William Shibambo, who worked as an artist on a part-time basis, inspired Hassan to become an artist himself.

Hassan first pursued his interest in art by working with Matsemela Manaka and his Creative Youth Association (CYA), which provided participants with a studio to explore their interests in theatre, music, poetry and visual art.

In 1978, he enrolled in art classes at the Arts and Crafts Centre at Rorke’s Drift in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), where he advanced his skills in sculpture and pencil drawing, among other media and met fellow artists Dumisani Mabaso, Pat Mautloa and Sam Nhlengethwa, among others. He used the skills he learned at Rorke’s Drift to teach others in his community, coaching his cousin and CYA members in printmaking, woodcuts and painting. After some time away from the school, he returned to finish his arts and crafts certificate in 1980. Later, he participated in a group exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum. In 1981, Hassan participated in a group exhibition at the Africa Centre in London.

In the 1980s, he worked as part of the group Art in Motion (Artimo), which devoted itself to the promotion of work by black artists, staging exhibitions in Britain and South Africa. He also studied at Bill Ainslie’s Johannesburg Art Foundation.

Hassan sought freedom to experiment and cultivate his own artistic inclinations through earning an income distributing Staffrider magazines, selling his work at open exhibitions in Soweto and making portraits of people in his community.

He exhibited at the Bradford Print Biennale in 1983. The French government awarded him a scholarship to study printmaking with SW Hayter at Studio 17 in Paris from 1986 to 1988. After his tenure at Studio 17, Hassan studied at the Schule fur Gestaltung (School of Design) in Basel, Switzerland and held a solo exhibition there in 1989.

In 1990, he returned to South Africa to teach at the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA). He became a teacher at the Alliance Française in Soweto and participated in Thupelo Art Project workshops in 1985 and 1989.

Hassan became known for his paintings, collages and installation works depicting scenes of political and social import.

In 1994, he started acquiring unused billboard advertising sheets from printing companies to make what he called paper constructions. A profile by Rory Bester in the Journal of Contemporary African Art (spring/summer 1999) quoted Hassan saying:

People spend a lot of time waiting for transport and they are forced to become familiar with the billboard images they pass every day. I’d love to install my paper constructions on these billboard sites at train stations and bus stops, so that instead of people having to look at beer advertisements they can see an artist’s image that speaks to them.

Working on a large scale, he created multimedia images in a painterly style, depicting scenes of voting queues and commuters packed in minibuses. He also collaborated with Pat Mautloa on installation projects during the early 1990s.

Since the 1980s, Hassan has exhibited his works throughout South Africa and abroad, in New York, Minneapolis, Gwangju, Umeå, Rome, Munich and Cologne.
In the 1990s, Hassan began working at the Bag Factory Studios in Johannesburg (formerly known as the Fordsburg Artists’ Studios), collaborating with other artists such as Sam Nhlengethwa, Pat Mautloa and David Koloane.

His work was included in the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, and, in 2000, he became the first recipient of the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Contemporary Art. In recognition of this achievement, fellow artist David Koloane noted that Hassan’s work ‘is not angst ridden nor is it vengeful or unfeeling … It brings to [its] audience a quest for human understanding and reflects Kay’s profound feeling for humankind’.

In 2008, Hassan was given a mid-career retrospective exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. He held a solo exhibition titled Everyday People at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City in 2014, in addition to participating in several group exhibitions and the 2015 Venice Biennale.

His works are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ontario, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the High Museum in Atlanta, and the National Museum of African Art at the Washington, DC Smithsonian Institution, the Walther Collection in New York and the Daimler Art Collection in Berlin.

SOURCE
‘Kay Hassan,’ South African History Online, https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/kay-hassan.