Hermann Niebuhr is a South African artist who lives in Johannesburg. He utilizes oils on canvas in a classical painterly style to document urban decay as well as rural landscapes.
Niebuhr was born in Johannesburg in 1972. He studied at Rhodes University, Grahamstown and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (with distinction in History of Art) in 1993.
He spent six years in the arid region of South Africa known as the Karoo. Working from the small town of De Rust, Niebuhr isolated himself and developed his technique. Upon his return to his hometown of Johannesburg in 2002, he began to confront the challenges of living and making art in one of Africa's largest and politically most complex cities.
Niebuhr's exhibition 'Night Shift' (2008) brought him to the heart of the city. Armed with only a camera, he entered the neighborhoods which had most dramatically shifted from Art Deco affluence in the mid-to-late 20th century to poverty and crime in the early 21st. Niebuhr photographed the foyers of the lovely old buildings and then painted them in oils, taking the perspective of the (somewhat symbolic) security guards protecting the edifices and their residents. These accurate and objective paintings, unpeopled but resonant with history, create a sense of melancholy around the city's decline.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2010 White Painting, CASA LABIA, Cape Town
2009 Mine, ASHANTIGOLD GOLD OF AFRICA MUSEUM, Johannesburg
2009 Bram Fischer Memorial, BRAMFISCHERVILLE COMMUNITY HALL/JOHANNESBURG DEVELOPMENT AGENCY, Johannesburg
2009 The Great South African Nude, EVERARD READ GALLERY, Johannesburg
2009 Champagne for my Facebook Friends, THE CANOPY GALLERY, Johannesburg
2008 South Africa Abroad, HODNETT FINE ART STUDIO GALLERY, Vancouver
2008 Night Shift, THE CANOPY GALLERY, Johannesburg
2007 Antarctica - On Thin Ice, UNITED NATIONS GALLERY, New York
2006 A Month of Sundays, GALLERY ON THE SQUARE, Johannesburg
2005 Night Ride Home, ABSA GALLERY, Johannesburg
2004 City Berlin, JABLONSKI STRASSE STUDIO, Berlin
2004 An African in Ireland, ENNISKERRY GALLERY, Dublin
2004 Celebrating 10 Years of Democracy, EVERARD READ GALLERY, Johannesburg
2004 Town/Country, CAROL LEE FINE ART, Johannesburg
2001 Up and Coming, SOAN STUDIO, London
2001 South African Landscape, UNISA ART GALLERY, Pretoria
COLLECTIONS
Absa Bank; Webber Wentzel; KPMG; Sasol; Rhodes University; General Cologne; Rosengarten-Rosin & Wright; J.P.Morgan; SAB Miller; Nedcor; Modise Attorneys; Ashanti Gold; Novocol
A collection of 39 interviews with South Africans of note, this book includes an interview with Hermann Niebuhr.
Excerpt: "Niebuhr's latest project is the logical follow-up to his 2005 exhibition, Night Ride Home, which encapsulated the nightly journeys from his studio in Fordsburg to his house in Kensington. It resulted in a beautiful, almost dreamlike overview at the Absa Gallery, full of blurred visions and shattered lights, a kind of Edward Hopper for the 21st century. The new paintings seem to go even deeper. “As your language develops you're able to describe more authentically the things you can see," says Niebuhr. “That's what I'm doing now. I go into the buildings. And once you're inside, they will still carry the knowledge from when you first saw them and thought: ‘Oh my God’."
Excerpt: "Niebuhr’s recent depopulated cityscapes are infused with the speed and pace of the city. More about selection and reduction than direct representation, they capture a sense of how it feels to be downtown."
Excerpt: "In the sense that Niebuhr is recording lived life in the city right now, he is a documentarist, but his practice as a painter militates against the objectivity and immediacy of social realist endeavours."
Excerpt: "The paintings depict the foyers of Hillbrow flats. Stark and provocative, they encourage you to look a little deeper and even make you want to venture inside. But a strange silence resonates from them. They show the quiet mystery of the city's witching hour - 3 am - when security guards (though neither they nor other people feature) pass the hours watching over sleeping flat-dwellers."
Excerpt: "His name is Hermann Niebuhr, and he’d stunned us all after we graduated from university in South Africa in the mid-90’s by buying a tumbledown tin-roof shack in a remote Karoo dorp (village) where, he said, he planned to live the life of the ascetic artist, painting desolate landscapes populated by scrub, sand, and rusty windmills. Ah well, to each his own."