About The Artist

Artist Biography

Izak Geldenhuys has been painting for the greater part of his life. He was born in 1958 in the town of Kroonstad, Free State Province and matriculated at Grey College, Bloemfontein in 1976. He practised as an attorney and later as an advocate but in 2009 he became a full time artist after being injured in a motorcycle accident in 2008. During the period from the 1990s to the present he regularly undertook extensive trips through Southern Africa to places such as Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania. He prefers places where there are no or few people and he often works in the open spaces such as the bush or desert, painting the odd sand dune, Gemsbok or Nguni cattle. His two solo exhibitions in 2006 and 2007 mainly dealt with the scenes of these trips.

In 2011, Izak enrolled as a full time student in Fine Arts at the Tshwane University of Technology in order to develop as an artist and in order to enable him to improve the meaning and content of his work. He obtained the National Diploma in Fine Arts with distinctions in all subjects and in the same year also won the prize for best student, Fine and Applied Arts.

His style has developed from impressionistic to exactness and precision or realism. In his latest works, he began departing from the traditional landscape and wild life scenes and started to depict people and the emotions they experience during their everyday lives. His solo exhibition in 2013 had two themes. It focused on his emotions after his accident in 2008 with beautiful self-portraits and some of the works were part of his Anglo Boer War series. His recent exhibition in 2014 titled “Man and Beast(3)” dealt with his experiences while travelling through southern Namibia and the Kgalagadi whilst his etchings inter alia commented on the Marikana massacre.