Elfriede Dreyer, Presto Agitato (2024). Mixed media on canvas, 760x910mm.
Beethoven Moonlight Sonata, III, Presto Agitato, played by Valentina Lisitsa,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zucBfXpCA6s. Right click to play
SHORT BIO
Elfriede Dreyer is a South African conceptual, intermedial artist, curator, and mentor. She
has held several solo exhibitions (in South Africa and France) and participated in group
exhibitions at major galleries, museums, universities, and art festivals, both locally and
internationally. Her work is included in the public collections of UP, Unisa, Telkom, DBSA,
FNB, and various private collections. After 25 years of full-time teaching at the University of
Pretoria and Unisa, she has been affiliated with Unisa as an Extraordinary Professor of Art
since 2015. She is the Vice-President of the South African National Association for Visual
Arts and is internationally recognised as a curator. Her publications have appeared in both
local and international academic journals and books, contributing to her NRF rating in 2012.
Composite (2025)
Elfriede Dreyer
ARTIST STATEMENT
This new series of work has moved away from my previous working with my piano as object
and further explores the transmutation of sound into words, images into sound, and words
into images. I am both composing and producing the sound on/in my piano. The focus here
is on landscape, viewed as a sentient entity—one whose language is received through the
senses of sight, sound, and spatial awareness. As a negotiation between presence and
absence, silence and resonance, the intersection of sound and image becomes a composite
palimpsest of sensory impressions and meanings. Such sensory translation takes on
particular urgency in the context of deafness, where sign language functions as both
metaphor and method. Situated within the discourse of the Anthropocene, my intermedial
practice engages with the entangled consequences of human activity on ecological and
geological systems. I consider land not only as a site of environmental crisis, but also as a
palimpsest—a repository of memory, transformation, and deep time. Within this conceptual
framework, I draw on the archetypal duality of mother and father as foundational principles
in nature: the maternal is evoked through soil, earth, and cycles of nurture and regeneration;
the paternal through stone, structure, and endurance. Rock, in particular, operates as both
witness and archive—inscribed with the temporal pressures of geological formation and
anthropogenic disruption. Through this lens, my work seeks to open new territories of
meaning-making between body, environment, and time.