Vivian van der Merwe

Vivian Hubert van der Merwe was born on 29 May 1956 in Cape Town, and spent his childhood and school years across the Cape Province, Transvaal, and Natal. He had no formal early training in art, though his talent was evident from the start.

He completed his undergraduate degree in fine art in 1980 at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, studying painting under Stanley Pinker, and went on to complete his Master of Fine Art in 1983.

His early work, from 1976 to 1981, was marked by high realism and extreme naturalism — a sensibility he traces to his Dutch and Flemish heritage. Over the following decade, from 1978 to 1988, that precision gave way to an increasingly deliberate deconstruction of pictorial representation, as he tested how far the conventions of still life could bend.

The mature style for which he is best known emerged from that period of dismantling: compositions built from refined structural relationships — shape, colour, light, and texture — rather than from the still-life objects themselves. As he has put it, “when language is pushed to the limits of its expressive form, it reaches a threshold beyond which it can no longer cope.” It is in that threshold, beyond the object and beyond the word, that the paintings work.

Vivian has lived and worked in Stellenbosch, in the Cape Province, since 1995.