Fanie Buys is a South African born, London based artist. Working predominantly in a figurative style, oil painting is a starting point for a practice which includes: sculpture, drawing, and cura- tion. Buys’ work destabilises the supposition that a recognisable image is a static representation of reality through translating it in to a painterly language. His paintings invite viewers to consider mass celebrity and internet culture through painting’s historicity: questioning gender, subjectivity, and cultural hierarchies. Buys is currently an MFA candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. He graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2016 and has since been exhibiting in South Africa, the UK, France, and the USA. He is the winner of the Abercrombie and Kent Prize (2023), The Judy Steinberg Award (2016), and the Simon Gerson Prize (2016). He has been included in Sanalm Portrait Awards, The Chelsea Art Society Summer Show, and the Nandos’ Creative Exchange.

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About these works:

"These works are the product of my first 6 months at Goldsmiths, where I’ve been reconsidering how I make meaning in my practice. They are a progression from presenting a body of work as idea to making one work considering one idea on a single painting plane.

 

What are these ideas? It’s a free association game with female character actresses and homosexual ephemera. For myself, and a lot of gay men, there is a tendency to inhabit a feminine role as a means of self-expression: whether its to empower, protect, or avoid ourselves. In many ways that’s also been the role of portraiture historically. These works use painting as a genre to consider a contemporary gay sensibility through images: Julianne Moore and PrEP, cowboys and oranges, Anna Nicole Smith’s concerned eyes and a douche bulb.

 

In some respects this is very much tied to my own sense of self, but because of the way media informs society, that sense of self is tied to so much external noise: through images. When that sense of self is transgressive, the images become a secret language, in my case the language of camp. The works use images (and titles) as witty rejoinders charmingly delivering concerns about self worth, gender, and having it all in the 21st century.