KEITH ALEXANDER (1946 – 1999)
Namibian Landscape
1985
oil painting
60 x 90 cm
BIOGRAPHY
Over a relatively short career of 25 years, Keith Alexander created an impressive oeuvre of over 500 photorealist and surrealist paintings. He drew on memories from his life experiences as the subject matter for his paintings, beginning with the memories of the 10 000-acre farm his family owned in his country of birth, then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He attended boarding school in London where the damage sustained during war-time bombing raids still lingered, and on his return to southern Africa, he became increasingly aware of the contradictions inherent in his deeply colonial and politically fraught upbringing.
He majored in sculpture in his undergraduate Fine Arts degree at the then University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal). In his Honours thesis, he explored Surrealism and studied the work of Salvador Dali, Joan Miró, Max Ernst and Rene Magritte. After university, he attempted to make a living as a sculptor with minimal success. In 1974, he started painting instead and, with his oils on canvas, Alexander was better able to create his own distinct visual language, characterised by repeated motifs (of mirages and ruins) and chiaroscuro lighting with a nod to Romanticism.
As he travelled across Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, Alexander found inspiration in the deserts of Namibia, particularly along the Skeleton Coast and in the abandoned town of Kolmanskop, the impact of which is seen throughout the artist’s oeuvre. In their own idiosyncratic way, Alexander’s surrealist images are subtly reflective of the political turmoil caused by South Africa’s oppressive apartheid regime and the resistance against it. His images allude to the heightened drama, the destruction and the mood of expectation that underlay that time.
In 1999, the year following his untimely passing, the substantial monograph Keith Alexander: The Artist in Retrospect by David Robbins was published.