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Writer's pictureMonica Blignaut

Bronwyn Katz

Artist 24 Bronwyn Katz Minimalistic Sculpture

Bronwyn Katz is a South African artist who works in sculpture, installation, video and performance. Katz engages with the concept of land as a repository of memory, reflecting on the notion of place or space as lived experience, and the ability of the land to remember and communicate the memory of its occupation.


Her wall-based wire sculptures are a continuation of her exploration into the charting of existing places and memories as well as imagined spaces, or dreamscapes, and with them she investigates the potential of her materials to serve as markers and representations of space and memory.


Working primarily with discarded bedsprings sourced from forgotten and neglected spaces in Johannesburg's CBD, artist Bronwyn Katz. Her work explores space and memory through materials and markers.


Katz is a founding member of iQhiya, an 11-women artist collective.


Her work reflects not an individual voice, but rather akin to a condition. They are evocative of urban lifestyles that arise within states of uncertainty and deprivation, emblematic of the manifold deficiencies in local socio-economic provisions.




Katz reduces and reforms her salvaged beds and wires with the utmost delicacy, leaving figures which speak of dissection and restraint.


Her process of removal and remaking evokes ‘what is no longer here’. the absences of these diminished forms reflect a kind of muteness or ghostliness that shows how her process of abstraction summons a condition of ghost stories.


Katz’s decidedly minimalist finish, in all its crispness and precision, recasts these otherwise common or abandoned remnants with a touching dignity.


What I love about Katz’s work is the delicacy of how she handles and presents her materials. In materiality we examine the history of the material we use and it is highlighted here in the story and the absence.


These points become the focal point and draw questions of the lives touched by these materials. It also reflects a throw away culture which is applicable to people.




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