André Pienaar

South African contemporary painter based in Cape Town. I work in a modernist-inspired language, creating original artworks.

I explore portraits, landscapes, interiors and still lifes through memory, emotion and spirit.

I work primarily in oil, oil pastel and gouache, offering original paintings alongside limited-edition prints.

My paintings carry traces of Cubism, Fauvism and Post-Expressionism, but follow a personal visual language shaped by the tension between what I see and what I feel, between observation and intuition.

I accept a small number of commissioned works that honour personal stories and meaningful places.

Limited-edition prints draw on the forests, coasts and other wild places I visit, and ten percent of every print sale supports wildlife conservation.

BA Visual Studies (University of Pretoria)

The study of both the social construction of the visual field, in other words the way we see, and it exploration the visual construction of the social field, because we are also seeing beings. On a theoretical level, Visual Studies draws from the ideas and discourses rooted in the disciplines of Art History, Cultural Studies, Media and Film Studies, Aesthetics, Visual Anthropology, Material Culture Studies and Philosophy. Visual Studies aims through an inter-disciplinary and comparative approach to make sense of the visual within the broader paradigm of critical discourses such as new urbanism, poststructuralism, critical race and gender theories, new media, post-colonialism, and post-humanism to name only a few. This is a vital new field of study that presents exciting research opportunities in an ever expanding arena of visuality.