Kay Hassan

The hopeful emergence of a democratic, multi-cultural country from a racist regime is one of the most exciting developments on earth. The South African artist Kay Hassan, who experienced this explosive process firsthand in his hometown Johannesburg, needed to achieve both artistic distance and emotional intensity in his works, and then translate his approach into a personal yet universally understood visual language. In his drawings, oversized brightly colored collages on billboard paper, and, above all, in his expressive poetic installations, he examines the links between the private and the public, the political and the artistic, the sociological and the psychological aspects of his life and the environment that surrounds him, describing them in terms of a traumatic historical past and the dawn of a changed society. (German edition available ISBN 3-7757-0917-7) The artist: Kay Hassan, born 1956 in Johannesburg. Since 1980 numerous exhibitions in South Africa, Europe and the U.S., including at the Pretoria Art Museum, the Cité International des Arts, Paris, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Haus der Kulturen, Berlin, the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale and the Académie de France, Villa Medici, Rome. Kay Hassan lives and works in Johannesburg.