PAUL STOPFORTH makes paintings and works on paper that focus on fragments of history and memory. The influence of 50’s movie posters to the remnants of a military occupation, from the influence of Hindu deities to interrogation sites; these works demonstrate his willingness to embrace disparate spaces and the objects that inhabit them.
Stopforth studied at the Johannesburg School of Art and was awarded British Council Scholarship to attend the Royal College of Art in London; he and his wife Carol made the decision to leave South Africa in 1988, perhaps the bleakest year of the state of emergency period. Over the course of his career, he has held numerous one-person exhibitions both in South Africa and in the U.S.A. He has been represented in group shows in this country and in Europe, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies. Public collections holding his works include the Harvard Film Archive; the Constitutional Court of South Africa; Tufts University Gallery; the National Gallery, Cape Town; the Johannesburg Art Gallery; Durban Art Museum; the Pretoria Art Gallery; and University of the Witwatersrand Art Galleries. Stopforth is especially noted for an important series of drawings based on the death of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko. This work remains enduring testimony to the overt and covert legacies of apartheid-era interrogation and torture, and to the innumerable deaths in detention and through assassination that so characterized the Apartheid regime. Around the time of Biko’s death in detention in 1977, soon after the opening of Market Theater complex in Johannesburg, Stopforth established and co-directed the alternative Market Gallery, perhaps the most important showcase of the visual art of liberation in late Apartheid South Africa. He taught in the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard for 10 years and is currently visiting faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
David Krut Publishing, Johannesburg, under the Taxi imprint, is currently producing a monograph on Paul Stopforth. |
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