Thelma Van Rensburg

Explore about the Famous South African artist Thelma Van Rensburg, who was born in South Africa on April 15, 1969. Analyze Thelma Van Rensburg’s net worth, age, bio, birthday, dating, height-weight, wiki. Investigate who is Thelma Van Rensburg dating now? Look into this article to know how old is Thelma Van Rensburg?

Thelma Van Rensburg Biography

Thelma van Rensburg was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1969. She studied and traveled extensively and had an interest in art, but unfortunately went to Hoerskool Tegnies Witbank which meant no art! There, she joined the Drama team and did quite well. In 2000 she acquired her Ba Hons. degree in Psychology at the University of South Africa and in 2007, she acquired her B-Tech Honours Degree in Fine Art from the Tshwane University of Technology. She completed a master’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of Pretoria University in 2016. She is currently enrolled as a PhD student in Practice Based Research at The University of Plymouth in The United Kingdom.

Thelma van Rensburg is a South African fine artist who was born in Pretoria, South Africa on 15 April 1969. She is based in Pretoria and focuses her work on the manipulation of ink on paper, but she also draws with pencil and charcoal. Thelma explores female sexuality and how women are represented in the mass media concerning beauty or ugliness, issues of otherness and the Gaze. Her art making process is adventurous – ranging from mixed media, painting and drawing to digital work. She has been a participant in competitions such as Sasol New Signatures competition 2007 in Pretoria, Ekurhuleni competition in 2009 and Vuleka competition in 2009 in Cape Town and Art Lovers competition in Pretoria in 2014 and 2015 and was a finalist in all of these competitions.

After school she was really interested in Gymnastics and decided to study a B.A Hons in physical education. She worked for few years and kept studying receiving her B.A Hons in Psychology in 2000, and then she went to Taiwan to work as a teacher. Her co-teachers there called her the PROP Queen as she made the best props as teaching aids. In 2001, she decided to go study art as she still has not found her groove yet. She got married in 2003 and started studying art full-time in 2004. Being married and studying called for some really tough times but she received her Diploma and finished her B tech in 2007 focusing on printmaking and painting. We could say she was a late bloomer. In 2008 things started moving and then she finally found something she was good at and it was digital art. Her thesis focused on the Postmodern Identity with interest in the female form and the ideals that woman are supposed to live up to according to society and the media. Her main means of art making was manipulation of images with Photoshop and this medium allowed her to endless possibilities in art making. She loves what she does and doesn’t see herself doing anything else. It has been a long and winding road but now she can call herself an artist.

Since 2008, she participated in several group exhibitions, including one at the Fried Contemporary Gallery in Pretoria; Maggie gallery in Centurion; the Gallery at Duncan Yard Pretoria; and the MAP Gallery in Graskop. In 2009, she took part in a group exhibition at Deluxeville Gallery in Woodstock; the Rusten-Vrede Gallery Durbanville in Cape Town; in the Affordable Art Fair at Fried Contemporary Gallery in Pretoria; St Lorient Fashion and Art Gallery in Pretoria; Aardklop Arts Festival in Potchefstroom. She had also a solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus in Cape Town in September 2009, and she was a finalist in the Ekurhuleni Fine Arts Awards as well as in the Vuleka Sanlam competition in Cape Town the same year. In 2010, her work was showcased at The Gallery at Duncan Yard on many occasions; the Articles and Frames in Pretoria; at the [email protected] in Centurion; the Gallery 18th Avenue in Pretoria and at the Artspace Warehouse in Johannesburg.

In 2013 she started working with the female form as abject and grotesque to subvert fetishized representations of women in fashion photography. This interest progressed in her Masters research when she came upon a proliferation of fashion spreads that depicted women in passive states, such as dead or dying as pioneered by the French fashion photographer, Guy Bourdin. Her dissertation offers a feminist critique of the representation of women in the media and the partially biased construction of femininity. The focus is on the representation of women in contemporary fashion photography and visual texts, and specifically the way in which a link is constructed between femininity and death.

This work critiques the ‘master’ painter’s gaze on the female form. The term ‘master’ was applied throughout the history of painting to an elite group of supposed male genii. These collages use images from these ‘master’ paintings to literally create grotesque female bodies of fetishized body parts. The use of the grotesque signifies the transgressing of boundaries, in which this transgression is a critical feature of the ‘grotesques’ relationship with both the beautiful and the sublime. In aesthetic discourse, clear and discreet boundaries are integral to the apprehension of beauty. The grotesque is a ‘body in the act of becoming… never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. The work is thus a transgression of the patriarchal gaze and empowers woman’s self portraiture.

Throughout her work, she aims to portray the masks that women use in order to be accepted by the contemporary society. These masks become an alternative “skin’, distorting one’s identity”. By constantly using masks, women lose themselves in the process, their identity and sense of self becomes trapped in the mask. The mask conceals that which they do not want others to see, thus deceiving others and distorting their concept of self. The concept of masking is seen as a form of ‘Othering’, and also place oneself as other or as masked is already to position oneself in a resistive position, whereby difference is threatening to the logical explanations, habitual practices and unquestioned assumptions of the established order and its defined categories.

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