(B. 1963 Pretoria, South Africa)

Wayne Barker is a fine artist based in Komatipoort. He rose to prominence in the late ‘80s, at the height of the political unrest during apartheid. He remains one of the most prolific and influential artists to have emerged from the country.

 Barker’s work has featured in several global biennales, art fairs and important retrospective exhibitions. He works in various mediums, including but not limited to painting, printmaking, sculpture, video, performance and installation. In addition to collaborations with other artists, Barker has collaborated with the Qubeka Beadwork Studio based in Cape Town, South Africa, to realize large-scale glass beadworks. Major concerns have included the legacy of colonialism in South Africa, issues of land and contestation – as evidenced in works referencing the paintings of JH Pierneef – issues around race, reconciliation and accountability as well as a sensitivity to humanist concerns that border on the poetic. His works have influenced contemporary art practice in South Africa, with several of his contemporaries and younger artists citing his work as turning points in perspective and practice.

Barker was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1963 to a white, conservative, working-class family. Barker’s father was a South African Air Force pilot, later turned commercial pilot and Barker and his siblings grew up on the Valhalla military base in Pretoria. After studying at Pretoria Technicon and half-completing a degree at Michaelis, Barker returned home in 1983. He evaded military service through pretending to be mentally unstable and – having been disowned by his parents – set himself up as an artist in Johannesburg. Barker later went on to pursue an honorary postgraduate degree in Fine Art at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles, in 1998.

Barker’s name has become synonymous with rebelliousness and recklessness. He has been referred to consistently as the enfant terrible of the South African art sphere. Barker’s Famous International Gallery (FIG) was a turning point in the exhibition of South African contemporary art between 1989 and 1995. An artist-run space, the gallery was a place for younger artists to exhibit their work. Many of these artists eventually rose to prominence, including Kendell Geers, Minnette Vari, Barend De Wet and Stephen Cohen.

In 1993, a year after the end of the Mozambican civil war, Barker created a large-scale installation piece at the Everard Read Gallery entitled ‘Coke Adds Life’. The installation was inspired by a trip to Mozambique, in which Barker visited a hospital and found several Coke vending machines but no doctors.

‘Nothing Gets Lost in the Universe’ was Barker’s third solo show, shown at the FIG Gallery in 1995, and later the Gallery Frank Hanel in Frankfurt. Informed in part by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the exhibition consisted of latex gloves filled with objects found on the streets of Frankfurt as well as a larger installation of photographs, called ‘Zelbst’, in which over 300 portrait photographs of black people in 1970s South Africa were suspended from the ceiling.

In the early ‘90s, Barker started an investigation that would span over two decades. Taking the work of the Afrikaner nationalist landscape artist JH Pierneef (1886–1957), Barker began to disseminate what remains to this day a highly contested issue in South Africa – land, colonialism and ownership.

Barker would painstakingly recreate Pierneef’s landscapes before introducing other elements to them – including neon dots, splatters of lacquer paint in neon colour, overlaying images he would pick (nudes, “church ladies”, and popular logos) in order to elaborate on issues surrounding land, contestation and desire in his own time. The Pierneef series has seen iterations in various media, finding itself translated into print media as well as in his collaborations with the Qaqambile Bead Studio in Cape Town.

Barker remains a prolific and active figure in the South African contemporary art scene. In addition to ‘Super Boring’ (2010), a large-scale retrospective of his work at the Standard Bank Galleries in Johannesburg and Polokwane, as well as the SMAC Gallery in Cape Town, Barker has had two recent large-scale exhibitions of new work at CIRCA in Johannesburg. His most recent exhibition, ‘The World that Changed the Image’ (2016), shown at the Everard Read in Johannesburg, consisted mainly of new screen-printed works.