Stian Deetlefs is a contemporary South African artist who was born and raised in Richard’s Bay, a major industrial port city on the North Coast of Kwa-Zulu Natal, and much of his work reflects on his experience of this heavily industrialized environment.
Deetlefs’ subject matter is drawn from his daily life working in factories for minimum wage, presented through intensely layered and gestural marks, using a combination of both traditional fine art media – oil paint and pastel, for instance – as well as industrial, household, and found material – such as PVA and spray paint, stainless steel, and burnt wood substrate. He is fascinated by the work of modern Abstract Expressionist artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and his portraits of people he has encountered on the street, in the port, during his daily life engaging with the working class and informal sector are presented through the lens of his understanding of modern art history. Both his painting and sculpture practice employs the idea of thrown-away objects as a metaphor for ‘thrown-away people’, aiming to provoke a sense of uncertainty through expressive gestures in which the viewer can get lost.