Ancient of Days, 2024
Born in 1994, Adrian Fortuin is a Johannesburg-based artist whose work is concerned with the relationship between figuration and abstraction in the context of post-apartheid and post/de-colonial South Africa. Working in a range of media, the scope of which is primarily informed by a conceptual approach, Fortuin is interested in the limits of representation and how personal identity is connected to family, language, ancestry, community, and society more broadly. He draws on personal, public and popular image archives to investigate the role art can play in restitution, memorialising, and narrative-making.
Fortuin graduated from the Wits School of Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 2020, and was the recipient of the Wits Young Artist Award and the Martienssen Prize in 2019. He is currently enrolled in the MA Fine Arts programme at Wits University in Johannesburg, where his practice has shifted from a performative and lens-based approach to a transmedia engagement with painting and drawing. His paintings are characterised by an obsessive process of revision, in which paintings are sedimented under newer paintings, so that the painted surface becomes an archive of thought and gestures, and a metaphor for the endurance of personal historical traces in the present.
Fortuin has shown his work in group exhibitions in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Kampala, and the roaming African platform Boda Boda Lounge, and in 2022 completed a short residency at the David Krut Print Workshop in Johannesburg. In 2023, his work was part of the two-person exhibition Fresh Voices (together with Kaelo Molefe), and was presented at Art Joburg.