Brett Murray (b. 1961 Pretoria, South Africa) is a South African artist known primarily for his satirically incisive sculptures and ‘The Spear’, a wildly infamous portrait of the nation’s past president, Jacob Zuma. His work functions as an introspective stock-take on the artist’s positionality within the social climate of South Africa at a particular moment, with which he aims to entertain. ‘In reflecting on what is unfolding,’ Murray comments, ‘I hope to articulate a very personal understanding and an idiosyncratic psychological sense of place, and begin to describe who I am with this anomalous vision. Paradoxically, through this critique and comic exposure, I actually begin to define a preferred ideal in which I would like to live.’
Murray has a Master’s degree in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town (1989) and was the winner of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2002. Murray is one of the country’s most popular visual artists, using recognizable media images with the addition of a subversive and bitterly funny twist.
Spanning bronze, steel, plastics, print, video and marble, Murray’s work grapples with the wars of cultures, the clash between Afro- and Eurocentrism, the old and the new South Africa's, identity politics and the ways in which political discussions have been shaped for the worse by social media.
