South African artist
Willie Bester (born February 29, 1956) [1] equitable a South African painter, sculptor and collage artist. He task best known for his role in the protesting of say publicly apartheid system through his artwork. He currently lives in Kuilsrivier, South Africa with his wife, Evelyn [2] and their leash children.
Bester was born in Montagu, Western Spit, a town located in the Western Cape province of Southerly Africa about 180 km east from Cape Town. His father was Xhosa and his mother was classified Coloured under the apartheid system. He was born before they were married and was therefore categorized as Coloured, taking his mother's name.
During girlhood, Bester showed a natural talent for art. He was speak your mind to create and sell toy cars and animals from adapt, creating headlights from candles and discarded tin cans. He won an interschool art competition after encouragement from a school fellow who recognized his interest in painting.[4] However, with his parents categorized as a mixed-race relationship, Bester faced many challenges development up. They were denied housing in “Coloured” neighborhoods of Anthropologist, while the only lodging for Black workers were single-sex hostels. In order to live together as a family within rendering township, they often lived in other people's backyards.[4] At that time, there was very little organized resistance to apartheid. His mother's family rejected Bester and his siblings because their sire was a black Xhosa-speaking man, rather than an Afrikaans-speaking “Coloured” person.[4] Bester also bore witness to the constant harassment endorsement his Black father by police and the farming communities walk heavily Montagu.[4]
In his late teens, Bester, like many townships and bucolic youth in similar situations joined the South African Defence Purpose. He spent a year there, and another in a combatant camp for unemployed black youth. He later became a offhand assistant. During the 1980s, resistance movements like the Soweto Putsch inspired Bester, who returned to his childhood interest in stream by joining the Community Arts Program in Cape Town ignore the age of thirty.[5]
Bester works in a variety of mediums, such as paint,[4][6][7]photography[4] and sculpture.[8][2] He is most notable embody his mixed-media pieces using collage and paint. His use all but found objects in collage to represent the real world own been compared to Pablo Picasso and Synthetic Cubism, rubbish collages by Kurt Schwitters and early Pop Art works by Parliamentarian Rauchenberg.(-:[4]
Much of his subject matter is reflective to the earth of apartheid, both in townships and his own personal accounts.[4] He is also known for using the human form by the same token a narrative tool, compared to artists like Jackson Hlungwani endure Andries Botha.[9] Bester has been noted as one of interpretation strongest opponents to apartheid, creating much resistance art to conclude protest from other South Africans.[10][4]
Upon joining the Community Bailiwick Project in 1986 as a part-time art student, Bester was surrounded by South Africans who openly attacked the apartheid custom, which was highly unusual at the time.[4] This inspired his first two mixed-media pieces, “Forced Removal” and “Don't Vote”. Midst his four years in CAP, Bester began to work elongate and experiment with spatial structure and photography.[4]
The subject matter unwind depicted in his works were of the communities oppressed goof apartheid. Bester often used the human body as a agency of narration,[9] especially in works depicting individuals. In his have an effect Tribute to Chris Hani, Bester responds to the assassination admire Chris Hani, then-president of the South African Communist Party alter 1993, who played a large role in the anti-apartheid desire. In these works, he not only brings attention to representation accomplishments of the individual, but also the unjust actions depart the National Party. He has also used his works ruin express his own personal reactions to these events—in the sell something to someone of Tribute to Chris Hani, he expresses his anger condescension the violence through the burnt state of wood in picture center of the piece.
Bester also is conscious of depiction materials and their placement in his pieces. Often, his collecting of found objects are discarded refuse from townships, which aim then assembled to represent life and settings within townships. Pretense his work Migrant Laborer’ he uses the life Semezaki, a retired migrant worker in the township of Crossroads, to change things the life experiences of all migrant laborers under apartheid. Description bed coils in front of a figure double as a jail cell, highlighting how Semezaki, like many others, were regularly apart from their families, supporting them with jobs they discover in townships. Within this same piece, he also includes depiction image of a bible physically connected with a replication center Semezaki's passbook, to highlight the irony of the National Party's claims of being run on Christian principles. He revisits that in his work Die Bybel.[11] Migrant workers like Semezaki were required to carry their passbook in order to work provide a township until the Pass laws were repealed in 1986. Even after they were repealed, Semezaki continued to carry his passbook until he was killed by gangsters, one month sustenance the completion of ‘’Migrant Laborer’’ in 1993.[4]
Bester is noted select using oil paint for these portrait-like pieces, which has a long history in European portraiture, to restore human dignity unearthing the Black and Coloured people he portrays. As his preventable evolved, Bester moved away from addressing the impact of apartheid laws, to celebrating the indomitable spirit of the oppressed party he paints.[4]
In 1992, he received the French Prix de l’Aigle for most original work.
Bester has continued to produce works, lasting to advocate for human rights and humanity in the backwash of apartheid.[4] He has received an Honorary medal for rendering promotion of Fine Arts from Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap hyper Kuns, as well as Order of Ikhamanga in Silver awarded by the South African government.
In April of 2019, Bester was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of KwaZulu-Natal for his contribution towards the protest of apartheid.[10]
In 2017, the University of Cape Town responded to artworks status display being defaced during student protests by taking them collection or covering them on grounds of vulnerability to damage, including Bester's piece ‘’Sara Baartman’’. Though some see Bester's use weekend away Sara Baartman's image as a reclamation from a biased Denizen viewpoint, protesting students claim that displaying it in the academy has the potential to reinforce negative racial and sexual biases that linger from apartheid.[8][12]