LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jane Alexander: South Africa
built 640 days ago
Jane Alexander is a sculptor whose works comment on current sociopolitical issues in South Africa. Using direct modelling techniques and working in plaster, she produces lifesize figures, which gain presence from their human scale, and small figures set in multimedia installations.
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Jane Alexander was born in 1959 in Johannesburg. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the 1995 Venice Biennale, the seventh Habana Bienale, and in The Short Century. Alexander is a member of the teaching staff at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in Kapstadt, where she lives and works. She is the recipient of the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Sculpture 2002.
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Most of Alexander"s works deal directly or indirectly with the situation in South Africa. But in "Erbschein: An den Bergen" ("Certificate of Inheritance: By the Mountains"), a highly personal work created in 1995, the artist turns to reflects on part of her family history. It consists of a cube surrounded by the building cranes of contemporary Berlin. Mysterious dark bundles are suspended from these cranes. Inside the cube is a picture of the house in which her Jewish father lived, before he was forced to leave Germany in 1936. In front of the house is a miniature memorial depicting the Jewish people as a reptilian monster conquered by "Aryan" Germans.
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Last September to November, Alexander's work was seen on 'Africa Africa', at the Tobu Museum of Art in Tokyo, curated by Toshio Shimizu. It was an opportunity for the artist to make a first visit to Japan, and some of the new collages incorporate images from this visit.
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