Willem Boshoff,
b. Johannesburg, 1951

After receiving a teacher's diploma from the Johannesburg College of Art, Boshoff pursued a diploma in fine art (printmaking) in 1980 and a masters in sculpture from Technikon Witwatersrand in 1984.

Boshoff is an artist of ceaseless intellectual and creative motion. His work, which is highly conceptual and primarily text based, focuses our attention on the ideological, historical and ongoing struggle between dominant and subordinate languages. Whether he is continuing a longstanding project of creating a dictionary of obtuse terms or designing site-specific installations that speak to the interplay of indigenous languages, apartheid and the building of a rainbow post-apartheid nation, Boshoff is leading his viewer into a challenging, at times bewildering, universe of scripted forms and lexicons. He questions not simply the truth value of written script but also the "cultural capital" required to "read" it. Working in a wide array of materials, from stone to paper to sand to mixed media, Boshoff's investigations of the workings of language provide fascinating reflections upon the assumed shared understandings of an arbitrary network of signs that make up the vocabularies of any tongue.

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Writing in the Sand,

2001
Sand
Collection of the artist

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