South Africa
Adrian Fortuin is a Johannesburg-based artist whose work explores the relationship between figuration and abstraction in the context of post-apartheid and post/de-colonial South Africa. Working in a range of media, the scope of which is primarily informed by a conceptual approach, Fortuin is interested in the limits of representation and how personal identity is connected to family, language, ancestry, community, and society more broadly. He draws on personal, public and popular image archives to investigate the role art can play in restitution, memorialising, and narrative-making.
Fortuin graduated from the Wits School of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 2020, and was the recipient of the Wits Young Artist Award and the Martienssen Prize in 2019. He is currently enrolled in the MA Fine Arts programme at Wits University in Johannesburg, where his practice has shifted from a performative and lens-based approach to a transmedia engagement with painting and drawing. His paintings are characterised by an obsessive process of revision, in which paintings are sedimented under newer paintings, so that the painted surface becomes an archive of thought and gestures, and a metaphor for the endurance of personal historical traces in the present.
Fortuin is influenced by the work of Tracey Rose, Moshekwa Langa, and Daisuke Yokota, as well as expressionist tendencies in African modernisms and postmodernisms. He has exhibited his work in group exhibitions in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Kampala, and the roaming African platform Boda Boda Lounge, and is featured as part of the SOLO section at the 2024 Investec Cape Town Art Fair. His work is held in a number of private collections.
Roomer
2024 Oil painting and oil pastels on canvas 50 x 50 cm
A Pale Fire, A Blue Rider
2024 Oil painting and soft pastels on canvas 150 x 150 cm
Butcher Boys Blues
2024 Oil painting and soft pastels on canvas 80 x 60 cm
Lest We Forget
2024 Oil painting and soft pastels on canvas 160 x 120 cm
To come undone I chained my wings to the sky.
2023 Oil paint and oil pastel on canvas Diptych 130 x 160 cm
Orēsen (To free oneself): Remember that your nose is a pyramid that will face the sky
Oil paint, cotton and oil pastel on canvas 220 x 140 cm
Beautiful boys in the wake
2023 Oil paint and oil pastel on canvas 140 x 140 cm
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