Heidi Fourie

Heidi Fourie’s practice is led by an intuitive process of deep contemplation, observation and openness to organic processes of the natural world and the spaces we occupy. Walking in, and sometimes crawling through, natural environments is seminal to the artist’s process and feeds her visual vocabulary. Fourie hopes to foster a curiosity and appreciation for inexplicable cycles, creatures, and dramas playing out within rocky crevices, grass fields, forests and ravines. And, perhaps, inspire a conscious, and later habitual, perceptiveness. Within her creative expression, the artist aims to become a conduit through which paint can move how it wants, within frameworks she sets out, with the help of collected imagery from the natural spaces she has access to. Fourie is endlessly curious to uncover the countless mark-making and representational possibilities of pigment, binder, and solvent solutions and their applications. For the artist, painterly marks not only make up subjects but are subjects in themselves. Through her work, Fourie delights in observing how, like gorges and glaciers, fuelled by gravity and densities, solvents can carve paths through colourful particles until they settle and set.

Heidi Fourie, full-time artist and part-time lecturer from Pretoria, completed her BA Fine Arts (cum laude) in 2012 at the University of Pretoria, specialising in painting, where she received the Bettie Cilliers Barnard bursary. She has had five solo exhibitions with galleries in Cape Town and Johannesburg. In 2019 she became a fellow of the Ampersand Foundation which resulted in a month-long residency in New York, NY in July 2019.

SELECTED PROJECTS & EXHIBITIONS

2021 – ‘Grass You can Swim In’ solo exhibition with David Krut Projects, showing her venture into printmaking. 2018 – ‘Lilac Chaser’ solo exhibition with Salon91; Cape Town Art Fair with Salon91. 2017 – ‘Field,’ Salon 91; ‘Trees Make Forests,’ end-of-year group exhibition, Salon91; FNB Joburg Art Fair with Salon91; Solo exhibition, Fried Contemporary, Pretoria; Turbine Art Fair with Salon91; ‘Growth,’ curated by Banele Khoza, Woordfees; ‘See Art,’ curated by Derek Zietsman, Gallery 2, Johannesburg. 2016 – ‘Oracle,’ an end-of-year group exhibition, Salon91; ‘Borrowed Scenery,’ a solo exhibition at Salon91; Turbine Art Fair with Salon91; Cape Town Art Fair with Salon91; ‘Skerwe Verbeeld/Fragments Imagined,’ two-man show with Allen Laing, KKNK, Oudtshoorn. 2015 – ‘STELLAR,’ group show at Salon91; ‘Paint it Black,’ a group exhibition at Salon91; ‘Islands’ at Lizamore & Associates Gallery, Johannesburg (solo); ‘Last night I had the strangest dream’ at Twilsharp studios, Johannesburg. 2014 – ‘Visual Encounters,’ University of Pretoria staff exhibition, Rautenbach Hall, Pretoria; ABSA L.Atelier finalist exhibition, ABSA Gallery, Johannesburg; ‘Post Colonial Africa’ curated by Paul Bayliss ABSA KKNK, Oudtshoorn; ‘Nomad Bodies,’ curated by Prof. Elfriede Dreyer, Wintertuin Gallery, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Artesis University College, Antwerp. 2013 - SPI Portrait Awards finalist (top 40) exhibition, Rust-en-Vrede Gallery, Durbanville. 2012 - Thami Mnyele Finalist Exhibition, Ekhuruleni.