Albert Coertse
(born 1980, Pretoria)
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 oil 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 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, still-life compositions 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.
Resume
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 Window 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
2008
Palettes For Prosperity, Mossel Bay
PRIDE, Artscape
The Bijou Burns Again, UCA Gallery, Cape Town, 2008
Twenty Artists | Twenty Portraits, UCA Gallery, Cape Town
2009
The Bijou Artists Open Studio Exhibition, The Bijou, Cape Town
Dark Side Of The Moon, UCA Gallery, Cape Town
The Creative Block, Red Black and White Gallery, Stellenbosch
2010
Freedom and Art, The Rainbow Experience, Mandela Rhodes Place
The Bijou Artists Open Studio Exhibition, The Bijou, Cape Town
Cape Quarter Summer Exhibition, The Lisa King Gallery, Cape Town
The Creative Block, Association for Visual Art, Cape Town
Smorgasbord, Wessel Snyman Creative
The Observatory Festival of Arts, The Bijou, Cape Town
@BIJOU Art Sale and Open Studios, The Bijou, Cape Town
The Bijou Collective, HAAS, Cape Town
2011
Art & Antiques Fair, Cape Town
Realisme Art Fair, Amsterdam
Autumn Group Exhibition, Christopher Møller Art, Cape Town
Haas presents Kierman & Coertse, Haas, Cape Town
2012
Summer Group Exhibition, Christopher Møller Art, Cape Town
Foodcorp Innovation Featured Guest Artist, The 7th Floor, Cape Town
2013
SAADA, Represented by Christopher Møller Art, Johannesburg
NAADA, Represented by Christopher Møller Art, Johannesburg
Cape Town Art Fair, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town
2014
Cape Town Art Fair, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town
Tollman Bouchard Finlayson Tondo Exhibition, Hermanus
Still, Johans Borman Fine Art, Cape Town
Black and White,Johans Borman Fine Art, Cape Town
2016
Group Exhibition ‘Allusions of Abstraction II’, Johans Borman Fine Art, Cape Town.
Commissions
South African Bureau of Standards (SABS)
JUTA Publishers
VIVLIA Publishers
Oxford University Press
SBPE Attorneys, Pretoria
Cecile&Boyd’s Interior Design, Cape Town
The Green Door Guesthouse, Mossel Bay
Multiple Private/Residential
Collections
Private:
South Africa, England, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, France, Turkey, USA
Corporate:
Nando’s Group UK
Hollard Insurance
Epilepsy SA
South African Bureau of Standards (SABS)
South African Gold Coin Exchange
South African Bible Society
© Albert Coertse