Artist Biography

John Kotzé paints his observations of everyday life in Harare, Zimbabwe, focusing on arrays of repeated objects or complex patterns.

The subjects he depicts are representative of life in Harare, and he believes his work to be inherently political, rejecting idealism and positing that everyday things and the lives of ordinary people are worth memorializing.

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John's work looks almost photographic, with a somewhat hallucinatory attention to detail and without obvious brush marks, employing oil paint's ability to produce smooth illusionistic images. This imparts a meditative, dispassionate quality to the work.

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Of his work, John says, "My paintings function as forms of visual music, abstracted into rhythmical and syncopated patterns of color and shape. Attention to pattern occurs across cultures and is especially apparent in Africa as these scenes and objects form the material patterns of our everyday lives."

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John Kotzé teaches at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe Visual Art School."