Diane Victor

Diane Victor, (born 1964, Witbank, South Africa) is a South African artist and print maker, known for her satirical and social commentary of contemporary South African politics.

Victor was born in Witbank, South Africa.

She received her BA Fine Arts degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1986.

From 1990 to the present, Victor has lectured part-time, teaching drawing and printmaking at various South African institutions including the University of Pretoria, Wits Technikon, Pretoria Technikon, Open Window Academy, Vaal Triangle Technikon, the University of the Witwatersrand, Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg.

Victor's work uses the figure, often her own self-portrait, to create complex narratives relating to contemporary South Africa and to the more global crisis of war, corruption and violence in both the public, political and in private life.

According to Virginia MacKenny, Victor's work challenges the viewer "to scour her heavily packed images, densely rich in individual detail, to discover their levels of irony and action. Singularly devoid of any classicising hope of order, these images recall Breugel or Bosch in their pessimistic view of the world and the heaping of one folly on top of another".

Victor depicts reality fraught with injustice, revealing the complexity of contemporary existence.

Her "ability to present her themes and subjects in a manner that all but forces our identification with them ejects us out of our complacent stupors, whether we wish it or not."

Victor's ability to keep moving forward throughout a career that spans over 30 years, has ensured that she remains at the cutting edge in terms of craftsmanship and techniques.

It also pertains to experimental drawing techniques, as seen in her invention of smoke drawings and ash drawings.

In the ongoing series of etchings, started in 2001, Disasters of Peace, Victor directly references Francisco de Goya's Disasters of War. In this series, Victor evokes Goya's criticism of the atrocities of war while demonstrating the continuation of violence after war, and in the case of South Africa, after the end of apartheid.

Highlighting overlooked and everyday violence, this series draws attention to this contemporary desensitised gaze or tolerance of violence.

To Victor: "The images I am working with are taken from our daily media coverage of recent and almost commonplace happenings in newspapers, on TV and on radio of social and criminal acts of violence and ongoing unnecessary deaths – occurrences so frequent that they no longer raise an outcry from our public, yet they still constitute disaster in peacetime.".

In her portfolio of dry point prints, Birth of a Nation (2009), published by David Krut Projects, Victor explores the history of colonial engagement in Africa in the context of contemporary corruption and imperialism.

She uses historical and mythological references as a platform to insert South African narratives, fusing a recognisable storyline with new characters and South African subjects.

Victor has exhibited her large scale ash drawings on numerous occasions, notably at the exhibition 'FUIR' at the Fondation Blachère in France, 2017 and at 1–54, Somerset House in London, 2019.

To date (2020) this series consists of forty five etchings, each depicting a different disaster.

In the striking ‘4 Horses’, a set of four etchings with additional digital printing, Victor throws the viewer off balance with the sheer force of the imagery as she fuses herself crouched into or on to the body of a horse.

Three of the four horses carry a human figure within like a foetus.

The fourth horse, carries a diminutive female figure strapped to its back.

As a print maker, Victor's interest has led her to work with several lithography studios around the world in South Africa, France and the United States.

With stone lithography in particular she has explored and stretched the boundaries which exemplify the richness and diversity that can be achieved with this print form.

Exploring the manière noire technique she has brought a richness of texture to her stone lithographs.

in the stone lithograph 'Jumping the Shadow', helplessness is inferred where a huge wild boar/man appears to be about to rape or crush the landscape existing in its shadow.

The shadow landscape also takes the form of a sleeping woman and the inference is that the man's inherent bestiality and aggression is the destroyer of both.

The boar has been created using the manière noire technique.

On the other hand, the shadow figure is created with delicate line work and a wash that expresses the vulnerability of the sleeping landscape/woman.

Meaning is thus created not only by graphic content but also by technique and medium.

Victor's smoke portraits explore subjects often overlooked, for example South African prisoners awaiting trial and missing children.

These portraits capture individuals caught in a vulnerable moment, an idea reinforced through the impermanent nature of the medium used.

Victor uses drawing media to capture both the subject's portrait and vulnerable condition that is somehow in-between presence and absence.

Victor is attracted to the direct correlation between the fragility of human life and the susceptibility of the physical image.

For Victor, "the portraits are made with the deposits of carbon from candle smoke on white paper. They are exceedingly fragile and can be easily damaged, disintegrating with physical contact as the carbon soot is dislodged from the paper. She was interested in the extremely fragile nature of these human lives and of all human life, attempting to translate this fragility into portraits made from a medium as impermanent as smoke itself"'

Victor used the same medium to express the similarity between human genetic coding and that of other primates who are almost "little brothers".

Yet like some distant and disowned family line we seem to feel no qualms at the knowledge of their persecution and endangerment.

The fragile and ephemeral process of candle smoke Victor felt was an appropriate medium for the portraits of the primates rendered fragile and impermanent by mankind.

The technique of using ash as a drawing medium developed from printmaking.

Texture and tone in etching is produced when rosin dust is sprinkled onto an etching plate to create an aquatint.

Victor realised that a similar textural effect could be created on a drawing by sprinkling ash.

• 2020 "Animal Farm" at 1–54 London, UK