Vivienne Koorland
MARIE, 2020
Pigment, oil medium, gum paper tape, glue and paper on linen-covered book boards
17 1/4 x 12 1/4 x 3/8 inches (43.82 x 31.12 x 0.95 cm)

Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

Selected by Rebecca Brickman

Born in Cape Town under Apartheid and based in New York, Vivienne Koorland’s rough-hewn hand-wrought stitched paintings in oil and pigment on cotton, linen or burlap cloth are the physical manifestation of the geopolitical content close to her heart. Along with her maps, poems, songs and stories, they negotiate the legacies of violence, colonialism, war, racisms and displacements that envelop us and the residual vexed problematic of language and narrative in painting practice.

Neither conventionally objective nor abstract, her representations of highly acculturated kitsch images of plants and animals, words, musical notes and quotations address the contested terrain of collective experience and the overdetermined revisions of historiography, while peddling the tropes that signify them.

Regarding herself as a de-skilled “history painter” who works to subvert prevailing constructions and staggering paradoxes of history, Koorland operates in a collision of accident and purpose where no trace is deemed too insignificant. Unabashed, with a troubled relationship to notions of authenticity, she remakes drawings, fragments and markings by deracinated, forgotten, overlooked persons and other artists into monumental paintings as an act of triumph and validation over rupture and ruin.

The artist takes a wry view of this project, its ambitions and its failures. She estimates herself to be either hopelessly reduced by finding refuge in the domain of the intensely personal or strengthened by this very limitation: sentiment weaponized and redeemed.

Exhibitions include Living by the Rule: Contemporary Meets Medieval, Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, UK (2026); On Hannah Arendt, Eight Proposals for Exhibitions: The Modern Age, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, UK (2021); William Kentridge and Vivienne Koorland, Conversations in Letters and Lines, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2017); Shifting the Gaze: Painting and Feminism, The Jewish Museum, NY, USA (2011); Homelands/Landmarks: Contemporary Art from South Africa, Haunch of Venison, London, UK (2008); Reiselmaheurs (Travel Woes), The Freud Museum, London, UK (2007). Fourteen paintings in Okwui Enwezor’s Alternating Currents, 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa (1997).