Jeremy Wafer
16 May – 30 June 2023
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Jeremey 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 and M.A. Fine Art 1987).
Wafer has taught in the Fine Art Departments of the former Technikon Natal (now DUT) and Technikon Witwatersrand (now UJ) before being appointed Associate Professor. Wafer received his PhD in 2016 and was subsequently appointed full professor of Sculpture in the School of Arts of the University of the Witwatersrand.
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. -
During his residency, Jeremy Wafer worked on a group of eight to ten works, included in an exhibition at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, that opened on 6 July 2023. The works were made using various materials including rope, cast cement, burnt timber, bitumen, blankets, cloth, sticks, mine dump sand, oil, and steel. “While the sculptures will be quite diverse in size, form and material,” explains Wafer, “they are linked I think by a common feeling of ‘somber-ness’ or darkness of mood. By way of example, I am planning a sculpture consisting of a number of bags of cement stacked on a steel trolley. The bags of cement will have been rendered inert, unusable and damaged by being left outside in the weather to get wet. Another work will consist of a pile of folded blankets painted with an aluminium bitumen roof sealer.”
