About Me
I’m a South African painter working predominantly in oil on linen from my studio in Onrus River.
My paintings begin without a fixed destination. Working intuitively, I let the image evolve on the canvas, and ideas and subject matter emerge as I paint. Through this process the figurative composition is gradually distilled to its purest form and essence: angular, hard-edged forms and colour that carry movement, rhythm and mood. I seldom know what a painting will become until it revealed itself. I want my work to be felt before it is analysed.
Where it began
I began drawing avidly as a youngster. After school I spent two years of national service stationed in the Kruger National Park, sketching the wildlife and landscapes around me in bistre. That time gave me a lasting love of the African outdoors.
I trained under my father, the artist Hennie Niemann Snr. Early encouragement from the painter Gregoire Boonzaier and the art dealer Johans Borman gave me the confidence to make painting my life’s work.
An African rhythm
Later journeys took me to some of the more remote wilderness areas in Southern Africa. The wildlife and landscapes have largely left my canvases. The rhythm and harmony I found there have not, and they still run through every figure and composition I paint.
Lines and colour evoke mood and emotion
Everything starts with drawing. Rembrandt and Daumier showed me how much a single line can carry, and that love of line grew into broad, confident brush and palette knife, impasto techniques. Cubism, along with modernists such as Serge Poliakoff and Eric Laubscher, pushed me towards abstraction: richly coloured, hard-edged planes, restructured to hold the energy of movement, gesture and mood.
Recognition
I’ve had a number of sell-out solo exhibitions, my paintings have achieved strong results at South African and international auction houses, most notably, Strauss & Co and Bonhams London. I was represented by the Johans Borman Gallery in Cape Town for over twenty years, until it’s closure in 2017, exhibited with Thompson’s Gallery at London Art Fair in 2019, and had a two-person exhibition with sculptor, Anthony Lane at 1-54 London in 2015. Today I am affiliated with the Walker Bay Modern Art Gallery in Hermanus and work directly with collectors from my studio in Onrus River.
