Apartheid Museum acquires painting for permanent display
Fantasize—Go All The Way 1986–1989. Oil and oil pastel on canvas H150 x W94 cm
Apartheid Museum Johannesburg, South Africa acquires painting for permanent display
The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg has acquired a painting donated jointly by the artist and his niece Dr Julie Kimber for its permanent display. “Fantasize – Go All the Way” was painted by Victor Gordon between 1986 and 1989. To Gordon, this acquisition represents “the pinnacle of my creative achievement”.
The Apartheid Museum chronicles the ‘struggle’ to overthrow one of the most heinous colonial socio-political systems in the modern world – based on racial segregation. The Museum is not an art gallery but has a select few artworks by distinguished South African anti-Apartheid artists from that era. Gordon’s painting now joins representative works by William Kentridge, Diane Victor, Paul Stopforth and Gavin Younge. It is the most-visited museum in South Africa attracting over 1000 visitors per day.
Gordon has been living in Australia since 1987. An activist artist, he undertook a Master’s research degree at Sydney College of the Arts (Sydney University) visually addressing the racial application of power in Apartheid South Africa. He also taught there part-time for several years. Among his many students were the young Ben Quilty and Shaun Gladwell – now both well-established and prominent Australian artists
Teaching art around the traps of Sydney included running the private Vaucluse Art School; he drove a taxi as well to make ends meet. He co-wrote the new teaching modules for TAFE NSW and taught drawing, painting, and sculpture classes at many TAFE Colleges around Metropolitan Sydney. Eventually, he took up a full-time position running the TAFE Art School at Broken Hill. He spent five years (1999-2003), mostly delivering Aboriginal art courses in Broken Hill, Menindee, Wilcannia and later, in Orange.
He transferred to the campus of TAFE Orange to manage the Art, Design, and Contemporary Music School. He has been residing in Orange since 2003 and is married to Kira Brown (from Coonabarabran) a Graphic Designer who established the well-known Sauce Design company
Besides his substantial contribution to art education in Orange, his extensive involvement with the local art world included public exhibitions of his own work. He held his first show in Orange at the Regional Gallery in 2005. He subsequently had a major survey exhibition there in 2012 curated by Dr Andrew Flatau. In April 2015 his Anzac installation memorate.com.au symbolically brought back (to Orange) the + 120 men from the Orange District, who lost their lives in WWI.
He did this by turning the gallery floor into the graveyard for the 120! (The only portrait from that installation was of Private Ernest Powter, who at 15 lied about his age and was dead by the tender age of 16. This painting is on view at the RSL branch Museum in Anson St – accessible on Tuesdays and Fridays). Most recently he held a highly successful solo exhibition in May/June of 2024.
He has been exceptionally prolific in his creative endeavours and has held multiple exhibitions.
Nationally he has been a finalist in the Sulman Art Prize and the Blake Prize for religious art.
His creative contribution to the struggle in South Africa has been extensively acknowledged in the new Democratic South Africa. He has artworks in the permanent collection of Iziko National Art Gallery in Cape Town, the Constitutional Court (Concourt) Collection in Johannesburg, and the University of South Africa’s (UNISA) collection. The major works from his MA were repatriated and are in the Ifa Lethu (Coming home) Foundation Collection currently housed in the Tshwane /Pretoria Art Gallery. This art collection has travelled extensively around South Africa, has been to London twice, Nice in France, and was opened in Canberra by the Late Australian Prime Minister, the Hon. Malcolm Fraser.
“Victor Gordon’s vision is provocative, disquieting, unyielding and savagely satirical. It is a formidable body of work that can change minds”.
— Dr Steven Dubin, (late) Past professor: Arts Administration, Colombia University, New York.
He self-published his graphic memoir “It wasn’t Me I won’t Do it Again” in 2022. He faces his future beset by ill health with stoicism and a dictum – “aluta continua” (The struggle continues).
This acquisition by the Apartheid Museum in Gordon’s hometown of Johannesburg, represents the culmination of his dedication to social justice through his visual arts practice.
The painting “Fantasize– Go All the Way” 1986-1989 is described as follows: Oil and oil pastel on canvas H150 x W94 cm
“Fantasize” promoted Fanta Cola (originally developed for Nazi Germany’s consumption by the Coca-Cola Company) and “Go All the Way”, which was directed at home grown rugby-playing Lion Beer consumers. Both were 1980’s South African advertisements. In a dystopian irony these roadside billboards were marketed at the occupying white police and army who patrolled Soweto, committing atrocities during the Apartheid era.
Their placement blocked-out the raging conflagration beyond, in the blacks-only residential zone. Underpinning the painting’s narrative is an abstracted fiery core – a bleeding subcutaneous tangled morass. The surface has an age-related craquelure. A tear in the lower right has been visibly stitched-up by the artist – intended as an appropriate metaphor for a society whose fabric has been painfully sundered, and crudely sutured back together.
Victor Gordon b.1953 MA (SCA) BA (Wits)
Artist and author
South African born artist, Victor Gordon has made and exhibited his art for forty-five years. He is primarily a painter and sculptor. He also creates installations, assemblages, collages, drawings and photographs. His wide-ranging concerns and techniques offer uncompromising, refreshingly unique and often quirky and challenging artistic statements.
