Gavin Jantjes was born in District Six in Cape Town, South Africa in 1948. He attended Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town between 1966 and 1969, after which he received a scholarship to study at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, Germany between 1970 and 1972. Producing controversial artworks criticising the apartheid regime in South Africa, Jantjes was exiled to England in 1982, where he has since taught, published and exhibited widely, the themes of internationalism and belonging being central to his painting and printmaking.
Painter, printmaker, curator, writer and lecturer, Gavin Jantjes was born in District Six in Cape Town, South Africa in 1948. Attending the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town between 1966 and 1969, Jantjes left apartheid South Africa in 1970 upon receiving a DAAD scholarship to study at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, Germany between 1970 and 1972, after which he was granted political asylum in Germany in 1973. There, Jantjes was a founding member of the German anti-apartheid movement, and he worked as a consultant Visual Campaign Director for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 1978 to 1982. One of Jantjes most radical expressions against the apartheid regime at this time was A South African Colouring Book (1974–5). Alluding to the structural oppressions and discriminations of life under the Afrikaner Nationalist Party, Jantjes’ colouring book showed provocative images such as South African Prime Minister John Vorster merged with Adolf Hitler, causing Jentjes’ entire oeuvre to be censored and banned in South Africa. Subsequently going into exile in 1982, Jantjes then moved to Wiltshire, England the same year.
In his first few years in England, Jantjes continued his artistic practice, exhibiting at the British Print Biennale in Bradford in 1982 and at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 1983. In 1984 he exhibited with the Midland Group, a progressive artist-led organisation that presented new art in Nottingham and the East Midlands between 1943 and 1987. In 1986, Jantjes created his Korabra series at the West Indian Association Club in Coventry, comprising seven acrylic, sand and pigment paintings exploring the story and horrors of the transatlantic slave trade (and exhibited at the Edward Torah Gallery, London). It was also at this time that he began exhibiting much more widely and became a recognisable figure in arts collectives, particularly in London. For instance, he exhibited oil paintings at Brixton Art Gallery’s Third World Within in 1986, alongside Rasheed Araeen, Keith Piper, and others; in 1986, he was part of the Monti-Wa-Marumo! (Boomerang to the Source) exhibition at the same venue, which comprised the artworks of 19 South African artists in exile (such as Pitika Ntuli), and which aimed to create and maintain a collective cultural identity that resisted erosion. In 1989 his work featured in the seminal survey exhibition, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, Hayward Gallery, London (1989).
The same year, Jantjes was appointed as Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, London, and until 1990 he served on the council of the Arts Council of Great Britain as its consultant for the formation of the Institute of New International Visual Art (InIva). Made an advisor for InIva in 1992, Jantjes edited their volume A Fruitful Incoherence (1998), which explores dialogues around works of art that deal with definitions of home, border and internationalism: themes that are important in his own work, writing and teaching. Jantjes also served on the advisory board of Tate Liverpool from 1992 until 1995, and he was a trustee of the Serpentine Gallery, London from 1995 until 1998, after which he left England for a position as Senior Consultant for International and Contemporary Exhibitions at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, near Oslo, Norway. Subsequently, in 2004, he was appointed Senior Consultant for International Contemporary Exhibitions at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo.
Despite moving away from England for some time, Jantjes continued to have an impact on the visual arts in Britain, exhibiting at the Whitechapel Gallery (2005), Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2005–06), in South Africa: The Art of a Nation show at the British Museum (2016), and at Nottingham Contemporary (2017). After returning to England in 2018, Jantjes held a solo show at Tyburn Gallery, London (2019), and received an increasing amount of critical interest. In 2021, he was a subject and speaker at the public lecture course at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, titled Black British Artists and Political Activism: Artists Against Apartheid, which explored the impact of the anti-apartheid movement on his early, overtly political works to his later non-figurative abstraction. Continuing to paint, Jantjes moves between England, Cape Town and Oslo. His works are held in many UK public collections such as the Arts Council Collection, Government Art Collection, Tate, and Victoria and Albert Museum.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Gavin Jantjes]
Publications related to [Gavin Jantjes] in the Ben Uri Library