Gavin Jantjes

Biography

In 1979 Gavin Jantjes published “A South African Colouring Book”: eleven collaged serigraphs designed as a child’s colouring book, except that its subject was apartheid. By other accounts the series was made in 1974–1975; I cannot give an exact date, and it may have been printed later than it was conceived.

He was born in 1948 in District Six, a neighbourhood of Cape Town. From 1966 to 1969 he studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. In 1970 his first solo exhibition was held at The Artists Gallery in Cape Town, and in the same year he left the country on a DAAD scholarship (the German Academic Exchange Service). He spent the next two years, until 1972, at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, the city’s art academy. He did not have to go back: in 1973 Germany granted him political asylum. He was one of the founders of the German anti-apartheid movement. From 1978 to 1982 Jantjes worked as a consultant on visual campaigns for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Serious paintings date from the same years. “School Days and Nights” (1978) was painted after the Soweto uprising: two boys are caught in the beam of a searchlight, a man, possibly a teacher, runs beside them, and to one side a white figure resembling Hendrik Verwoerd looks on. “Homesickness, a Blindman’s Paradise” (1982) is built on a memory of Cape Town: the silhouette of Table Mountain stands over a peaceful landscape, but two white men intrude into the picture, a collector with an African mask and an Afrikaner with a rifle.

His solo exhibitions followed one another: the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Henie Onstad Art Centre (1976), Groningen (1977), Stockholm (1978), Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (1979). In London his work was shown at the Edward Totah Gallery in 1980–1983, 1986 and 1990. Then came Nottingham, Liverpool, Coventry and Stoke-on-Trent.

In 1982 he moved his studio to Wiltshire, in England. From 1986 he taught fine art as a Senior Lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, part of the London Institute. From 1986 to 1990 he sat on the council of the Arts Council of Great Britain and advised it on the founding of the Institute of New International Visual Art (InIVA). From 1992 to 1995 he served on the advisory board of Tate Liverpool, and from 1995 to 1998 he was a trustee of the Serpentine Gallery in London. Among the books he edited in those years is “A Fruitful Incoherence: Dialogues with Artists on Internationalism” (InIVA, 1998).

In 1998 Jantjes became artistic director of the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter at Høvikodden, near Oslo. There he organised solo exhibitions of Gordon Bennett, Yinka Shonibare, Susan Hiller, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Shirin Neshat, Marlene Dumas and Carlos Capelan.

From 2004 he worked as Senior Consultant for International Contemporary Exhibitions at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, where he curated shows of Amar Kanwar, Harun Farocki and Nicholas Hlobo. He also directed the Visual Century project on South African art of the twentieth century and the present day; its outcome was the book “Visual Century: South African Art in Context” (2011).

He left the museum in 2014 and in 2015 reopened his studio in Oslo. He is painting again and divides his time between Cape Town, England and Oslo. By some accounts he returned to the studio only in 2017, after more than twenty-five years away, and moved away from political subjects: the “Kirstenbosch” series (2023) is devoted to the plants of South Africa. In 2024 a solo exhibition of his work was held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. His work is in the collections of Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Arts Council Collection, the National Museum of African Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the museums of Wolverhampton and Coventry.