Faith47

Faith47 artwork.
'Rhapsody' Rochester, NYC. 2012
Faith47 artwork.
The taming of the beasts, Shanghai, China. 2012
All shall be equal before the law, The Freedom Charter series, Cape Town, South Africa. 2010
Faith47 Mural in Ibrox, Glasgow 2014

Faith47 is a self-taught contemporary street artist based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Artistic Practice

Faith47 is best known as a street artist. She has received recognition for her work beyond her home country of South Africa and has participated in gallery shows and projects world-wide.

Street

Following an active street art career spanning more than fifteen years, her work can now be found in major cities around the world. Using a wide range of media, including graphite, spray paint, oil paint, ink, photography and collage, her approach is explorative and substrate appropriate – from found and rescued objects, to time-layered and history-textured city walls and their accretions, to studio prepared canvas and wood.

Through her work, Faith47 attempts to disarm the strategies of global realpolitik, in order to advance the expression of personal truth. In this way, her work is both an internal and spiritual release that speaks to the complexities of the human condition, its deviant histories and existential search.

Studio

Faith47's studio work, although viewed in an entirely different context to her street art, is influenced by the urban environments in which she operates. She works primarily on canvas, but often creates artworks on found material - old doors, sign boards, window shutters - using combinations of oil paint, spray paint, graphite and collage. Her signature style is clearly recognisable from her street work. Other elements are often referenced from source material that she has collected on the street and then replicated. Examples include phrases and drawings created by people on the streets, under bridges and on the walls of abandoned buildings, newspaper cuttings and signs in bus stations and taxi ranks. Although Faith47s studio work is shown in gallery spaces, as opposed to existing on the streets, she has 'retained the heart of her street work [and] the grit of the inner-city has been incorporated into the work.'[1]

Faith47s first solo exhibition, Fragments of a Burnt History (2012, David Krut Gallery, Johannesburg) considered the transformation of Johannesburg into a more representative African city, exposing the harsh realities of day-to-day life and capturing the remnants of South Africa’s complex history in a personal and symbolic manner. Through the creation of an immersive environment in the gallery space, this work challenged the viewer’s detachment.[2][3]

Her solo exhibition, Aqua Regalia (2014, London) further extends the possibilities of immersive spaces, enveloping the viewer into a sacred ‘room’ filled with collected objects and other intricacies from everyday life that – together with figurative paintings – explore the notion of the mundane as sacred and celebrates the discarded and unwanted as holy.

Exhibition and Project History

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

References

  1. ↑ Nurse, Jacqueline. Krut Projects "Between Street and Studio". David Krut Publishers.
  2. ↑ Nurse, Jacqueline. "Fragments of a Burnt History". David Krut Publishers.
  3. ↑ Smith, Michael. "Faith at David Krut Projects". Art Throb.

External links

Interviews/Features

Publications

Film & Video