Artist 335
Heidi Fourie
Oil painting
Heidi Fourie (1990) is a South African painter who specializes in oil painting. She is a full-time artist and part-time lecturer from Pretoria, where she earned a BA in fine arts from the University of Pretoria in 2012. Her works have been exhibited widely throughout South Africa, and in 2019 she became an Ampersand Foundation fellow in New York.
Her subject matter reflects the everyday and the familiar nature around us. The scenes and objects which she paints often evoke a sense of familiarity in viewers as it is taken from well-travelled paths and reflects everyday yet through her artistic lens she transforms these spaces.
Fourie creates gestural, nearly abstract landscape paintings. Gestural is an art term that is characterised by the vigorous application of the paint and expressive brushwork on canvas.
Through this Fourie captures her local countryside. She explores rocky crevices, grass fields, forests, and ravines. Often in subject matter her work will feature a lone figure and their engagement in nature.
Part of Fourie’s process is she experiences the landscapes she paints. Playing with tonal qualities her brushwork brings local terrains alive. Her practice is led by an intuitive process of deep contemplation, observation and openness to organic processes of the natural world and the spaces we occupy.
Through engaging these natural environments she feeds her visual vocabulary. Fourie hopes to foster a curiosity and appreciation for inexplicable cycles, creatures, and dramas playing out within rocky crevices, grass fields, forests and ravines. And, perhaps, inspire a conscious, and later habitual, perceptiveness.
Within her creative expression, the artist aims to become a conduit through which paint can move how it wants, within frameworks she sets out, with the help of collected imagery from the natural spaces she has access to.
Fourie is endlessly curious to uncover the countless mark-making and representational possibilities of pigment, binder, and solvent solutions and their applications.
For the artist, painterly marks not only make up subjects but are subjects in themselves. Through her work, Fourie delights in observing how, like gorges and glaciers, fuelled by gravity and densities, solvents can carve paths through colourful particles until they settle and set.
“Although I tend to paint in a realistic painterly manner, I constantly rethink the notion of ‘The painting’ and the limitations of the medium. I believe paint can reveal meaning in the seemingly meaningless, and value in the valueless.
I am fascinated by the fine balance between control, and uncontrollability, order and chaos, and figuration and its negation that comes into play when painting an image. I often reinvestigate and reinterpret the tradition of genre painting and my work often consists of multiple smaller fragments as opposed to single monumental pieces. Rather than competing with photography in order to create hyper realistic paintings, I explore and embrace painting’s own inherent language and marks.” - Heidi Fourie
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