Catherine’s iconic visual features have embraced rough-edged, laughable, yet nightmarish creations, rendered in brash animated shades.
Norman Catherine was born in 1949 in the small coastal town of East London in South Africa. He currently lives close to Hartbeespoort Dam in North-West. Other than two years of formal art training in high school, he is self-taught. In 1969, at the age of twenty, Catherine held his first solo exhibition, which featured oil paintings on wood, bone, wire and an assortment of found objects. His art has since undergone several metamorphoses, from the pristine airbrush paintings of the 70s to the frenzied, ritualistic mixed media works of the early and mid-80s, the wire sculptures and tin can works of the late 80s, and the primitive-futuristic paintings of the early 90s, which provided the seeds for his pre-millennial menagerie of anthropomorphic beasts.
Catherine’s art imbibes a dystopian vision of the socio-political landscape that informs his psyche. History, horror, crime, conflict, psychoses, politics and pathologies all serve as stimuli for his creative output, which vacillates between the macabre and the comic, between a gasp and a giggle. He conveys his cynical vision through a juxtaposition of dark and light sensibilities, veering between an internal hallucinatory realm and literal commentary on the material world. Catherine's idiosyncratic vision – a combination of dark cynicism and exuberant humour – and his innovative use of everyday materials, has secured his place at the forefront of South African contemporary art.
