Faith47

Faith47 is an internationally acclaimed street-and studio-based artist currently living in Cape Town, South Africa.

Following an active street art career spanning more than fifteen years, her work can now be found in major cities around the world. Using a wide range of media, including graphite, spray paint, oil paint, ink, photography and collage, her approach is explorative and substrate appropriate – from found and rescued objects, to time-layered and history-textured city walls and their accretions, to studio prepared canvas and wood.

Through her work, Faith47 attempts to disarm the strategies of global realpolitik, in order to advance the expression of personal truth. In this way, her work is both an internal and spiritual release that speaks to the complexities of the human condition, its deviant histories and existential search.

Faith47s first solo exhibition, Fragments of a Burnt History (2012, David Krut Gallery, Johannesburg) considered the transformation of Johannesburg into a more representative African city, exposing the harsh realities of day-to-day life and capturing the remnants of South Africa’s complex history in a personal and symbolic manner. Through the creation of an immersive environment in the gallery space, this work challenged the viewer’s detachment.

Her solo exhibition, Aqua Regalia (2014, London) further extends the possibilities of immersive spaces, enveloping the viewer into a sacred ‘room’ filled with collected objects and other intricacies from everyday life that – together with figurative paintings – explore the notion of the mundane as sacred and celebrates the discarded and unwanted as holy.