Rossouw van der Walt lives and works from his studio in
Botriver, Western Cape, South Africa.
Rossouw van der Walt’s work shows tempered realism, not exactly naturalism. In art theoretical circles it is maintained that the return to figuration after the abstraction of late modernism is one of the hallmarks of the postmodernist ‘style’ that we are experiencing currently. After the so-called ‘dead-end’ of art of the 1970s, during the 1980s many international artists such as Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz and David Salle started working mainly figuratively.
Van der Walt works very much within a context of the expressed body, without necessarily following an expressive style. His work shows a certain existentialism and irony as for instance in the imagery of the pregnant woman, carrying precious life, covered by cockroaches synonymous with death and decay. The work suggests that every living creature is mortal and has limited ‘shelf life’. Very much like the British artist Lucien Freud, sexuality is dealt with as a state of being, a specific boundary situation sited in time.
