Kerri Evans Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1967 -

KERRI-JANE EVANS - (b. 1967 Johannesburg, South Africa)


“The painting process is all important to me. I do not plan my work; it begins without the conditioning of idea or even conception. It is through the action of painting that the compositions arrive, the figures move and adjust in relationship… they come and go and are my primary vehicle of expression. Figurative representation is where I find my greatest delight, that sense of pleasure and identification with the emotional aspects of life … In this very act of painting, the physical application of paint – through this energetic stillness – subtle ‘felt’ perceptions arise and my imagination grows with these perceptions. The movement of thought, of idea, of relationship, my relationship with the painting, with the world in me and around me … the images unfold through this dynamic and become the journey, the way to comprehending the self.”



In this age of cybernetics, cynicism and simulacra, there exists the misconception that art should say big things about big issues. It is a discourse driven by ‘the idea’ and lubricated by the nutrients of parody, commentary and critique. The paintings of Kerri-Jane Evans move against this flow. And the term ‘flux’ is central to her vision because, like the constant shifts of light and colour that determine and regulate the cycles of day and night, colour and brushstroke in her paintings ebb and flow, and her forms seem to morph from solid and substantial to the ethereal. It is as though Evans is reluctant to impose too much authority or ownership on the paintings.



She never completes one painting before starting another. She works – or rather reworks – on all simultaneously. Each work in inherently, deliberately incomplete. In places her mark is stylized and linear, only to be subverted by her loose brushstrokes and unpredictable palette. For Evans the greatest challenge is to accept the paradox of incomplete endings. “The image never reaches completion; rather it stops at the point where it is taken away, almost like a small death.”