I am very pleased to announce an exhibition of early work by Vivienne Koorland (b. 1957, Cape Town) made in the late nineteen-seventies and early nineteen-eighties. The majority of the works in the exhibition are reunited for the first time since they were seen at the Michaelis School of Art, Cape Town. They document Koorland’s powerful, political image making and her haunting and masterful use of portraiture, and caricature. Gathered, the paintings and works on paper create a precise image of Koorland’s questioning of the visual and its relationship to narrative.

Vivienne Koorland graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 1977, after which she travelled to West Berlin to earn her MFA at the Hochschüle (now Institut) der Künste in 1981, followed by two years at the École Nationale Supérièure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, before arriving via Bayreuth to pursue an MFA at Columbia University in New York, where she still lives. Recent exhibitions include ‘William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland:  Conversations in Letters and Lines,’ Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2017); ‘Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism’, The Jewish Museum, New York (2011); ‘HomeLands/LandMarks: Contemporary Art from South Africa’, Haunch of Venison, London (2008); and ‘Reisemalheurs [Travel Woes],’ The Freud Museum, London (2007). Koorland exhibited fourteen paintings in ‘Alternating Currents’ at the landmark 1997 2nd Johannesburg Biennale ‘Trade Routes:  History + Geography,’ curated by Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya.