Full Biography
Albert Coertse is based in Onrus, a small town on the Southern Cape Coast a mere hour’s drive from Cape Town. He specialises in oils on CNC routed Valchromat or Medium Density Fibre board (MDF) as preferred medium.
He has done commissioned portraiture, figurative work and landscapes, but over recent years, abstract forms composed his pictorial language.
Albert J. Coertse was educated in communication design at the Open Window Art Academy, Pretoria and also studied interactive design at Malmö Högskola, Sweden. He obtained a bachelors degree in Industrial Design from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.
Artist’s Statement
I just see myself as an artist. I don’t set out to be overtly conceptual, although everything I paint or draw or sculpt comes from a considered place, however instinctive or impulsive its genesis may be. I work through ideas and concepts that are realised in images. I am not overly concerned that a ‘meaning’ should be imparted, but rather how successfully I can make an image grow, mutate and permeate to ultimately communicate with the viewer on a visual level.
I consider art as a self-learning tool and a way to keep stretching what I want to know of things. There’s always an initial excitement at an idea – the reason I become interested in things is generally because of conversations with someone or something I see in the media. It’s a knee jerk reaction followed by a need to find out more, to read more – obviously my interests are more biased to post-colonial theory and cultural studies, social constructions and the choices we make about them – and so, reading and finding background about that and putting it back into art for an audience. It’s always about wanting to have a discussion with someone but then in my art I also get to go off on my own little tangents.
My current series of works revolve around abstracted images, codified into individual flat islands of colour.
The paintings present graphically reduced details of portraits, building facades and vanishing landscapes as structural all-over linear grids. Whilst these paintings resonate formally with the rationalist modernist strategies running from Piet Mondrian to Peter Halley, their formal reduction is the product of a semiotically distilled reference to the urban world.
Artist’s Resume
Albert J. Coertse (b. Pretoria, 1980)
Painter, Sculptor, Illustrator, Designer, Independent Researcher : Epileptology, Registered Volunteer Worker : Epilepsy SA
Education :
Secondary Education
Matric/Grade 12 Certificate (1998)
Afrikaanse Hoër Seunskool, Pretoria
Tertiary Education
Art and Design
B.Tech Industrial-/Three Dimensional Design (2004-2007)
Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT), Cape Town
Interaction Design (January – June 2007)
Linuis Palme Exchange Scholarship Programme,
Malmö Högskola K3 , Malmö, Sweden
Communication Design and Multimedia (2001)
The Open Widow Art Academy, Pretoria
Multimedia and Computer Graphics Certificate Course (2000)
Department of Art History and Visual Arts, University of South Africa(UNISA), Pretoria
Awards/Prizes :
Mr Price HOME – Finalist 2004
Carol Boyes Mettle – Finalist 2005
Homemakers Expo 2005 – Special Mention
Ivy Blue Rotation Moulding 2005 – 3rd Prize
Rotation Moulding Association of South Africa(RMASA)2006 – 2nd Prize
Sasol New Signatures 2008 – Finalist
Exhibitions :
Palettes For Prosperity, Mossel Bay 2008
PRIDE, Artscape 2008
The Bijou Burns Again, UCA Gallery, Cape Town, 2008
Twenty Artists | Twenty Portraits, UCA Gallery, Cape Town, 2008/9
The Bijou Artists Open Studio Exhibition, The Bijou, Cape Town, 2009
Dark Side Of The Moon, UCA Gallery, Cape Town, 2009
The Creative Block, Red Black and White Gallery, Stellenbosch, 2009
Freedom and Art, The Rainbow Experience, Mandela Rhodes Place, 2010
The Bijou Artists Open Studio Exhibition, The Bijou, Cape Town, 2010
Cape Quarter Summer Exhibition, The Lisa King Gallery, Cape Town, 2010
The Creative Block, Association for Visual Art, Cape Town, 2010
Smorgasbord, Wessel Snyman Creative, 2010
The Observatory Festival of Arts, The Bijou, Cape Town, 2010
@BIJOU Art Sale and Open Studios, The Bijou, Cape Town, 2010
The Bijou Collective, HAAS, Cape Town, 2010
Art & Antiques Fair, Cape Town, 2011
Realisme Art Fair, Amsterdam, 2011
Autumn Group Exhibition, Christopher Møller Art, Cape Town, 2011
Haas presents Kierman & Coertse, Haas, Cape Town, 2011
Summer Group Exhibition, Christopher Møller Art, Cape Town, 2012
NAADA, Sandton Convention Centre, Johannesburg, 2013