Diane Victor

born 1964, Witbank, South Africa

Victor is a South African artist and print maker, known for her satirical and social commentary on contemporary South African politics. She studied in Johannesburg, has won many awards and in 1988 was a resident artist in Paris. This gave her an opportunity to collaborate and learn from other printmakers, and to reflect on a society much different from the turbulence of South Africa in the late 80s.

Victor's work explores the issues plaguing post-apartheid South Africa, such as violence, inequality and corruption. She uses the figure, often her own self-portrait, to create complex narratives and is particularly interested in exploring overlooked subjects such as prisoners awaiting trial and missing children. Her practice starts with drawing, often using experimental techniques of her own invention such as smoke drawing.  She uses these techniques to capture individuals in vulnerable moments, their vulnerability underlined by the impermanent nature of the medium used in the drawing.

Watch Victor discuss her 2018 sow at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, which displayed a visceral series grappling with South Africa’s gender-based violence epidemic and considers the complex social structures that underpin patriarchal power relations worldwide.

Victor’s work is very direct and confrontational: she isn’t scared to tackle taboo subjects and uses shocking imagery to urge viewers to step out of their comfort zone. Even so, she considers her work socially critical rather than dark. She wants people who view her work, to think about the society that we are living in, and then to reimagine it. In her dry point prints, Birth of a Nation (2009), Victor inserted into recognisable historical events and mythological stories South African characters, exploring the legacy of colonialism, contemporary imperialism, and corruption. Since 2001 she has been making a series of etchings entitled Disasters of Peace (after Goya’s Disasters of War) about the “everyday” violence experienced by many in post-apartheid South Africa. Taking news stories as her starting point, she creates images which draw attention to the way this violence has come to be tolerated as an unavoidable fact of life. 

According to Victor, her art-making process is intuitive, reflecting issues that anger or upset her and which she can’t leave alone. She transforms her feelings about these issues into art as a means of catharsis. She describes herself as an observer of society, and of human bodies which in her view keep score of our interactions, physical or psychological. She is interested in these “scores” because they have the potential to harm us in ways that we often can’t see.

Victor’s work has been exhibited in New York, London and other European cities as well as in Johannesburg, Cape Town and various galleries in South Africa. It is part of the permanent collections of many museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Iziko South African National Gallery, and Johannesburg Art Gallery.