1949–present
Norman Catherine
Norman Catherine (born 1949) began exhibiting at twenty: in 1969 the Herbert Evans Gallery in Johannesburg showed his oil paintings on wood, bone and wire. From 1973 he worked with Walter Battiss on the imaginary “Fook Island”, for which he devised a language, a currency and stamps. His rough-edged, grotesque creatures in bright cartoon colours are in the collections of MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum.
Biography
Norman Catherine’s first solo exhibition opened in 1969 at the Herbert Evans Gallery in Johannesburg. It showed oil paintings on wood, bone and wire, with found objects displayed alongside them.
He was born in September 1949 in East London, South Africa. He has almost no systematic education: in 1967–1968 he briefly studied at the art school of the East London Technical College, and that was the end of his formal training. For the most part he is self-taught. From 1973 Catherine worked with Walter Battiss, a South African artist of an older generation, on Fook Island, an imaginary utopian land that Battiss had invented. Catherine devised a language of its own for the island, its own currency and even postage stamps. Later the artist’s own home near the Hartbeespoort Dam, not far from Pretoria, was named Fook Manor. In the sources available to me there are no documents on how the work was divided between the two artists, so I would leave the details of this collaboration open. The critic Hazel Friedman traced his development decade by decade. In the 1970s he painted flawlessly smooth airbrush pictures. In the early and mid-1980s came feverish, ritual-like works in mixed media; in those years he lived in the United States, chiefly in Los Angeles and New York. The late 1980s brought wire sculptures and pieces made from tin cans, and in the early 1990s he painted “primitive-futuristic” pictures of part-human beasts, which Friedman regards as the seed of his later menagerie.
He works in painting, sculpture, printmaking and mixed media, and also makes bronzes and wall hangings. His themes are history, horror, crime, conflict, psychosis and politics. He presents all of this somewhere between the macabre and the comic, in rough, angular forms and harsh cartoon colours. He also uses ordinary everyday materials.
In 1993 he was invited to exhibit in the South African pavilion at the 45th Venice Biennale. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, as well as in other public and private collections in South Africa and abroad. In 2006 the Johannesburg Art Gallery held a retrospective, “Now & Then”. He now lives and works at Fook Manor.
Profile notes