Jozua Gerrard

Contemporary South African artist Jozua Gerrard’s figurative paintings capture states of intimacy, unease, vulnerability and contemplation in our post-internet world. With their smooth consistency and saturated lacquer of enamel paint beneath glass, his paintings deftly recall the screens we interact with daily.

Born in Cape Town in 2001, Gerrard forms part of a generation conditioned to pay rapt attention to the experiences that give them pleasure, turning them into stylised rituals for virtual display. Both observed and imagined, his subject matter is drawn from his immediate environment, offering “little windows into people’s existence”. The figures’ solitude within each work echoes the singular nature of the artist’s own commitment to the act of self-enquiry.

Gerrard’s practice is permeated by processes of digital image-making, with photography forming the foundation of his inquiry. His tightly cropped compositions evoke a sense of voyeurism, drawing the viewer into stylised scenes often constructed using friends as models. Through these tableaux, he interrogates the role of fashion, styling and curated interiors in shaping identity. The resulting photographs are digitised, then translated on to large glass panels, becoming physical simulacra of virtual spaces, grounded in real-life encounters.

Although he works primarily in a figurative mode, Gerrard’s paintings are informed by abstraction, giving precedence to essential form, colour and composition. In their radical flatness, heightened palette and crisp precision, the works present a fantasy-like, unsettling vision of reality. With their interweaving of interiority and surface, his paintings nod to the influence of idiosyncratic image-makers such as Cindy Sherman, Alex Katz and John Baldessari.

Earlier bodies of work are marked by a taut duality in tone, oscillating between tenderness and menace, concealment and brashness, innocence and desire. A bright red mask – sporting a pair of horns and bared teeth – is a recurring motif, obscuring his subjects’ faces and yielding a layer of safety and aggression. As Gerrard’s practice has developed, this device has softened into a flat oval with crisply defined features and, most recently, into a Pierrot-like face covering that has shed its horns.

Gerrard has held two solo exhibitions at Southern Guild in Cape Town: Loveland (2021) and In the Present Tense (2024). His first solo exhibition, What Keeps Me Up at Night, took place at WorldArt in Cape Town in 2021. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Mother Tongues at Southern Guild Los Angeles, Spring Awakening at Southern Guild Cape Town and In Plain Sight at Hexton Gallery in Aspen. Southern Guild has presented his work at fairs including Frieze Los Angeles, The Aspen Art Fair, Untitled Art in Miami and the Investec Cape Town Art Fair.

In 2026, Gerrard completed a five-week artist residency at El Espacio 23 in Miami, the contemporary art space founded by collector and philanthropist Jorge M. Pérez. That same year, he was awarded the Mack Art Foundation Artist-in-Residency Prize at the Aspen Art Fair, an annual award supporting emerging artists with an eight-week residency in New York.