When Jeremy Wafer won the Sasol Wax Art Award in 2006 for his installation Geography, Clive Kellner called the piece a powerful confrontation that demanded that viewers use “their personal history in understanding the work, thereby allowing the artist to engage with his audience in decoding the installation”. In his new exhibition at Goodman Gallery titled Strata, Wafer continues to explore the physical and psychic processes involved in the actualisation of art. Concerned equally with material as form as with the potential for political and personal evocations in material, Wafer identifies his practice as post-minimalist. Rather than attempting to create works that are devoid of reference outside of themselves and their formal make-up, material and form are used as a way of inducing feeling and evoking a political and personal narrative. Wafer’s interest in the relationship between memory and location manifests in sculptures, drawings and photographs, which exist as instigators of remembrance and narrative, where “significance lies in between the works rather than in them”.
Jeremy Wafer was born in Durban in 1953 and studied at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A.F.A.1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980 and M.A. Fine Art 1987). He was appointed Associate Professor at the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg from 2004 where he has held the positions of Head of the Department of Fine Art and History of Art. He has exhibited regularly in South Africa and abroad. His work is represented in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, the South African National Gallery, the Johannesburg Art Gallery and in many other museum, private and corporate collections. His retrospective show Survey, was exhibited at the Wits Museum of Art in Johannesburg in 2013.
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About
Jeremy Wafer
Jeremy Wafer (b. 1953, Durban, South Africa) grew up in Nkwalini in what was then Zululand. He studied Fine Art at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (B.A.F.A.1979) and at the University of the Witwatersrand (B.A. Hons. in Art History 1980, M.A. Fine Art 1987 and PhD 2016).
Wafer taught in the Fine Art Departments of the former Technikon Natal (now DUT) and Technikon Witwatersrand (now UJ) before being appointed Professor of Fine Art in the Wits School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He retired from full time teaching in 2019.
Wafer is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, notably the Standard Bank National Drawing Prize in 1987 and the Sasol Wax Art Award in 2006. His work featured on the South African Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Wafer has exhibited in South Africa and internationally, his work is represented in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, the South African National Gallery, the Johannesburg Art Gallery as well as in many other museum, private and corporate collections.
Wafer lives and works between London UK and Johannesburg, South Africa.
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