(b. 1991 Johannesburg, South Africa )

Biography

​Jordan Sweke is an independent South African painter and photographer from Johannesburg, currently based in Cape Town. Jordan’s practice is concerned with an extensive and ongoing exploration of oil paint as a medium, but branches out into a wide array of media. His work is primarily influenced by the connection between humans and the natural world and focuses on natural South African landscapes and indigenous wildlife. All of Sweke’s reference photography is captured by the artist himself. His main concerns are to bring immersive natural landscapes into urban spaces and to urge the public to reconnect with their natural heritage.

 In 2014, Sweke received an Honours degree in Fine Art, specialising in painting, from Michaelis School of Fine Art. Every piece at his graduate exhibition was sold. Since then, Jordan has received strong support from local and international collectors. He has had numerous commissions and his works have been exhibited at many solo shows and at group shows that have included work by internationally renowned local artists.

​It is easy upon first reflection to review Jordan Sweke’s practice as an archetypical duality of realism vs abstraction. Sweke creates visual manifestations that stretch from detailed abstraction, into cellular binaries and through into formal landscapes. One can often be compelled to explore this variety as simply deliberate contradictions. On the one hand, we observe organic forests, trees, sky or the sea and then when we approach closer to investigate surface details, these quickly become a dissolved and broken geometry – like pure gesture, with pattern and coded formula.

​These contrasts of positive and negative spaces, lightness versus darkness, a chaos versus order, seem to evoke opposing narratives. However, by the artist’s own account, the combinations of the contrasts converge into a third thread, a ‘space’ which is not so much ‘abstracted’ or ‘realistic’ or ‘micro’ or ‘macro’ but rather an in-between that the audience inhabits as they engage with the artworks.

​There is a combination of natural materiality and digital process as well as of realism and abstracted pixilation and these all serve to catapult the audience from omniscient observer to face head on their actions, their effects, and our place within nature and the whole world around us.

Emma Van Der Merwe

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Artist's Statement

 ‘Nature’ is a problematic word. We understand it to be something other than ourselves. Through my work, I strive to re-align notions of nature and self. Detachment from nature corrodes the disposition of our interactions with the environment. This relationship needs to be reconstituted.

Paint allows for a visual agency that I believe many other artistic media cannot offer. A tactile emphasis on materiality is helpful in breaking illusions and revealing certain truths, while scale assists access to the sublime. My work explores notions of both the mathematical and the abstract; a marriage of the geometric and the organic.

Informed by counter intuitive outcomes of scientific theories, such as quantum mechanics, I strive to represent and distort reality through the interrogation of the relationship between spatial perceptions and numerical patterns. As well as initiating a dialogue regarding instinct and consciousness as apparently opposing binaries, each piece in my current body of work serves to create an accumulative conversation between the peaceful and the dreadful, the holy and the tainted.

Jordan Sweke, 2015

EDUCATION 

2010 - 2014 Bachelor and Honours in Fine Art, Specialising in Painting. Michaelis School of Fine Art. University of Cape Town, South Africa

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2019

It is Within, Everard Read, Johannesburg

2018       

The Eternal Death, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2016       

Salon 91, Cape Town, South Africa 2014       

Does our ruin benefit the earth? Michaelis Graduate Exhibition, Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town. South Africa

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 

2017

Cape Town Art Fair, Salon 91 booth, Cape Town, South Africa Artist’s Residency Project, with Skubalisto, Centro Luigi di Sarro, Rome, Italy Turbine Art Fair, Salon 91 Booth, Johannesburg, South Africa Winter, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

2016       

Turbine Art Fair,  Salon 91 Booth, Johannesburg, South Africa Pastoral Abstraction, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa STRANGERS ON FILM II, Work Hub, Cape Town, South Africa Breath, Water, Sound, Gallery Ongaro, Cape Town, South Africa CAPE TOWN ART FAIR 2015, Salon 91 Booth, Cape Town, South Africa 2015       

STRANGERS ON FILM , Work Hub, Cape Town, South Africa HOMAGE,  Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa Paint it Black, Salon 91, Cape Town, South Africa Turbine Art Fair 2015, Salon 91 Booth. Johannesburg, South Africa EMPIRE, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa WINTER, Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa 2013       

Whitman Independent Arts Festival, Bioscope Theatre, Maboeng, Johannesburg, South Africa

COLLECTIONS

Presidential Collection of South Africa Works held in Private Collections in France, South Africa and the United Kingdom

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