Current Artists

Hentie van der Merwe’s exhibition project launched at the Gallery University Stellenbosch (GUS) on 17 September until 19 October 2025. It was part of the 2025 Woordfees programme. Thereafter the After de Jongh exhibition toured to Oudtshoorn for the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees (KKNK) programme from 28 March – 4 April 2026.

Artist Statement

Central to my painting practice is the handling of paint to communicate and create affect – an immediate, instinctive and often indescribable emotional response or feeling. Using my hands and various brushes, I apply the paint to canvas and manipulate it with metal tools to scrape and smear it across the surface. Rather than focusing on composition, my practice underscores the canvas as a stage to explore memories and emotions, through paint’s affective quality. While these paintings are abstract, they draw from Tinus de Jongh’s (1885 – 1942) landscape paintings, which decorated many middle-class, white Afrikaner homes during Apartheid: the time and milieu of my youth. Raised on a farm, I have intimate, first-hand experience with many of de Jongh’s landscapes – each one serving as a point of departure, evoking memory and arousing a visceral reaction in me that I translate onto canvas.

Yet, as a gay Afrikaner, de Jongh’s landscapes are also, for me, objects of contention, encoded with Afrikaner nationalism, racism, heteronormativity, repressive religious dogma, patrimony and other related concerns. In this sense, his paintings exist as placeholders for the restrictive and oppressive atmosphere that permeated my childhood home. Thus, in my work, I explore this tension through brushstrokes that oscillate between flat and gestural – abstract by association with a sense of spontaneity – and blurred, suggesting movement and depth through atmospheric perspective, referencing painting’s affinity with illusion. This theatrical contrast between non-dimensional abstraction and the perception of depth aids in my exploration of the history of oil painting, as well as the ways that trauma and violence can be confronted through this medium.