Wayne Barker

Valhalla is the oldest Airforce base in the country, functional since 1921.

Growing up in the highly conservative atmosphere of Pretoria in the 70s could in some ways be seen as a catalyst and contributing factor to Barker's particularly rebellious and aggressive attack on that exact conservatism.

In Artist's Monologue, Barker recounts his childhood:

""We were absolutely part of a system where you were taught to hate black people," says Barker today. "It was entrenched in virtually every conversation at home." Yet he also recalls family gatherings as "quite real and warm, like there was a sort of gemutlich vibe.

You had drunk uncles playing match boxes and singing Sarie Marais and all that stuff.""

Wayne Barker (July 27, 1963, Pretoria), South African visual artist.

Barker is based in Johannesburg.

He rose to prominence in the late 80s, at the height of political unrest under the Apartheid regime.

His work has featured in several global biennales, art fairs and important retrospective exhibitions.

He works in various mediums, including but not limited to painting, printmaking, sculpture, video, performance and installation.

In addition to collaborations with other artists, Barker has collaborated with the Qubeka Beadwork Studio based in Cape Town, to realise large scale glass beadworks.

Barker was born in Pretoria on 27 July 1963 to a white, working-class family at the height of Apartheid.

Barker's father was a South African Airforce pilot, later turned commercial pilot and as a result, Barker and his siblings grew up on the Valhalla military base in Pretoria.

Barker and his brother attended Glen High School in Pretoria, before his expulsion in 1976 after being arrested for buying marijuana.

In his teens, Barker left home to learn woodcarving on the coast at Nature's Valley in the Western Cape.

On his arrival home and the completion of his high school studies, Barker pursued his arts education at the Pretoria Technikon, starting a diploma in Fine Art in 1981 before going on to study towards a BA in fine art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.

At Michaelis, Barker would begin to question the art making paradigm at school level.

Politically, South Africa was undergoing its most turbulent moment thus far, to which Cape Town, according to Barker seemed indifferent.

For a sculpture project under the supervision of Michaelis' Neville Dubow, in which students were required to sculpt an "extension of their bodies", Barker absconded from the trend which would see his classmates creating physical extensions and instead opted for the performative.

Barker chose instead, to dress up as his lecturer and have his classmates throw tennis balls at him, creating an extension of the man as a tennis court, which Dubow understandably found displeasing.

After two years in Cape Town, he would return to Gauteng without his degree and be conscripted into the South African National Defence Force.

In 1983, after having failed art history at Michaelis, Barker returned home to his father's insistence that he join the South African military as three generations of Barker men before him had.

To Barker, the SANDF represented everything about a South Africa in which he had no desire or aptitude to participate in.

At the time, the tense political climate had seen a previously unknown escalation, and was straining under intense pressure both internationally and from within.

The increased resistance to the apartheid regime had resulted in more and more military raids on private residences, and human rights violations.

However, despite his unwillingness, Barker's conscription papers eventually arrived and he would find himself back in Pretoria at the Voortrekkerhoogte military base.

Those who refused the service were jailed, so if he was to leave he had to be discharged.

Over the course of two weeks he choreographed and played a part that eventually led to his being declared unfit for service due to mental instability.

Upon his arrival home, Barker was disowned by his parents, and having to make his own way moved to Johannesburg to be an artist wholeheartedly.

Barker's Famous International Gallery (FIG) was a turning point in the exhibition of South African contemporary art throughout its existence from 1989 to 1995.

An artist-run space, the gallery was a space for younger artists at the time to exhibit their work.

The gallery allowed artists to showcase work that most if not all commercial galleries at the time would not touch, creating a platform for political and social subversion in the South African art scene that would prove instrumental.

The first major controversy and also the event that catapulted Barker into the public eye centred on the 1990 Standard Bank National Drawing Competition in which he had entered a highly unresolved and hurried work under the African name of Andrew Moletsi.

As a result, the Moletsi work was shortlisted, where Barker's was not, highlighting the biased, racially motivated judging systems that controlled the selection process.

After his short tenure at the SANDF, and having practiced for a period of time, Barker went on to pursue an honorary postgraduate degree in Fine art at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles, France in 1998, all the while creating and adding to a body of work that has maintained its social and political relevance in his home country and abroad.

Barker's name has become synonymous with a rebelliousness and recklessness, mention of which can be found in the accounts of several of his contemporaries, friends and those who would become his audience.

Often cited as having a "sex, drugs and rock n roll" approach to fine art, his persona had become a very prominent add-on to his artistic identity.

He has been referred to consistently as the enfant terrible of the South African art sphere, possessing simultaneously a profound sensitivity to life and art, bordering on the poetic as well as a deep rooted commitment to the truth or pursuit thereof.

It comes as no surprise that over the span of his career, he has offended, scandalized and landed in hot water more than once.

- Wayne Barker – Artist's Monograph, 2000, Chalkham Press