Pierre Fouché

Pierre Fouché, born in 1977, received an MA in Fine Art (Cum Laude) from the University of Stellenbosch in 2006. Fouché's work focuses on the deconstruction and reassembling of photographic representations, often working with images from his or his family's photo albums. Fouché has participated in various group shows including the District Six Public Sculpture Festival (1997), Softserve (1999), Sex & Kultuur Queer Arts Festival (2004), Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (2004), and Paper Never Lies (2005). His first solo exhibition, Excluded & Unsaid, was in 2005 at Cape Town's Blank Projects. Fouché 's highly successful first solo Bell-Roberts exhibition, The Distance between Us, was described in the Cape Times as a "beautiful visual essay about the slenderness of human relationships". In 2007 Fouché was the winner of the prestigious ABSA L'Atelier award. Translated from a family photograph, the work for which this award was given was a tapestry canvas, entitled The distance between us III. In two earlier pieces from the same series, The distance between us I and II, Fouché again used the technique of deconstruction and reassembling. Number I (2003) was executed using a found cardboard jigsaw puzzle, with the image of two men painted onto every second puzzle piece. For number II (2003-4), presented at the Bell-Roberts Gallery and purchased by Nando's in the UK, Fouché used 6,000 red dice with white dots. Early in 2008 Fouché left for Paris to take up a six-month artist's residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts. Upon his return to Cape Town Fouché will present his second Bell-Roberts solo exhibition.