Gavin Jantjes: Art, Exile, and the Politics of Representation

Gavin Jantjes was born in 1948 in District Six, Cape Town, at the moment apartheid formally took hold in South Africa, and that historical context shaped the arc of his life and art from the start. Trained at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, he left South Africa in 1970 on a DAAD scholarship to study in Hamburg and ultimately secured political asylum in Germany; a move that turned his practice into a voice in exile and a platform for anti-apartheid protest. Across more than five decades, Jantjes has worked as a painter, printmaker, curator, writer, and educator, moving between Europe, South Africa, and Norway while maintaining an intense connection to South African history and diasporic politics. His work and roles within museums and cultural organizations have made him a key figure in conversations about representation, activism, and visual culture. 

What drove Jantjes was less a stylistic school than a moral urgency: the need to document, critique, and unsettle the structures of racialized power that he experienced firsthand. Early in his career, he joined anti-apartheid networks in Europe and used his art as a visual campaign — both literal and rhetorical — against segregation, forced removals, and state violence; his practice combined witness, testimony, and inventive visual strategies to reach international audiences. This activist impulse fed a sustained interest in human rights, cultural understanding, and the possibility that art could function as a form of political instruction and persuasion. Jantjes has repeatedly described art’s role as extending beyond aesthetic pleasure to social responsibility and political education. 

Technically, Jantjes is best known for his bold screenprints of the 1970s and 1980s, works that marry the flat color and reproducibility of pop idioms with collage, stenciling, and graphic sign systems to deliver urgent messages. He published the celebrated portfolio A South African Colouring Book (1979), a series of collaged serigraphs that used the innocent format of a child’s colouring book to expose the grotesque logic of apartheid. This bleak, ironic inversion made viewers complicit readers of history. Over time, his palette and approach evolved: the graphic coolness of the prints gave way to richly textured paintings and mixed-media works that layered pigment, drawing, ceramic objects, and found materials into dense pictorial narratives. This material restlessness — print, painting, collage, ceramics — became a device for shifting modes of address: sometimes blunt and declarative, sometimes elliptical and poetic. 

From the mid-1980s onward, Jantjes moved toward more figurative, allegorical canvases such as the Korabra series, where mythic and historical references fold into symbolic landscapes populated by hybrid figures and artifacts. These later paintings read like “picture poems”: densely composed, deliberately ambiguous scenes that invite active interpretation rather than delivering a single didactic message. The shift from highly legible screenprints to figurative complexity was not a retreat from politics but an expansion — he traded slogan for nuance, using archetypal forms, ritual objects, and fractured perspective to probe memory, displacement, and historical trauma. Critics and curators have noted that these works foreground aesthetic experience as a way of reaching ethical insight rather than replacing political clarity with mere decoration. 

Jantjes’s work has been exhibited widely: early one-person shows at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and Kunsterhaus Bethanien in Berlin introduced his prints to European audiences. At the same time, major retrospectives and surveys, most recently the Whitechapel Gallery’s *To Be Free!, have reappraised his output across decades. His pieces are held in significant public collections, including Tate Britain, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Arts Council Collection, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, signaling institutional recognition that arrived unevenly but ultimately became substantial. Along with gallery exhibitions, Jantjes’s prints circulated in activist spaces, biennials, and politically oriented group shows, giving his images both museum legitimacy and grassroots reach. The exhibition history maps his trajectory from exiled dissident-printmaker to elder statesman of diasporic art, and it underlines how institutions have slowly caught up with the political urgency his work voiced decades earlier. 

Beyond his studio practice, Jantjes has shaped the art world as a curator, educator, and cultural bureaucrat: he taught at Chelsea College of Arts, served on the Arts Council of Great Britain, was artistic director of Norway’s Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, and worked on the Visual Century project documenting South African art. In these roles, he pressed for inclusion, cross-cultural dialogue, and institutional reform, often criticizing superficial attempts to diversify by arguing for structural commitments to contemporary artists and serious collecting. His curatorial projects, which include shows by Yinka Shonibare, Marlene Dumas, and others, while at Henie Onstad and later programming in Oslo, show that his commitments always bridged practice and policy. This dual identity as maker and maker-of-museums gives Jantjes a rare perspective on how artworks are framed, acquired, and historicized. 

The meaning of Jantjes’s work operates on multiple registers: it is testimonial, polemical, and poetic. On one level, his prints and paintings document the injustices of apartheid and the human cost of displacement; on another, they probe the ambiguities of exile, identity, and historical memory, using visual symbolism to unsettle received narratives. His recurring motifs: fragmented figures, maps, eggs, boats and altered landscapes,  function as metaphors for migration, possibility, and rupture, asking viewers to reckon with both personal loss and collective responsibility. As he has argued in interviews and essays, the aim is not to instruct viewers how to feel but to construct situations in which ethical attention and historical imagination are possible. 

Gavin Jantjes’s legacy is a double inheritance: powerful, readable artworks that confronted apartheid in real time, and a sustained institutional practice that has pushed museums toward more complex conversations about race, exile, and post-colonial representation. His trajectory,  from District Six to Hamburg, London, and Oslo, exemplifies how diasporic artists negotiate visibility, voice, and agency in international art worlds. Today, his prints and paintings read not only as historical documents but as living works that continue to ask hard questions about who controls cultural memory and how art can be a tool for justice. As museums revisit the histories they once omitted, Jantjes’s work stands as a model of art that insists on both aesthetic rigor and political seriousness.