Art Exhibitions

This influential Stellenbosch based artist is recognised for his deeply considered and refined works of art where stillness and monumentality are woven into complex and detailed compositions that compel the viewer to investigate and question. Inspired by some great creators from the artistic canon, van der Merwe distills the empty space, the quietness that goes beyond narrative and the conceptual which enables him to pursue the visual form in its purest element.

 

"His work translates the classical virtue of gravitas into a painterly whole that shifts between painted reality and sculptural force. The image asserts itself as an entity, contained by the unfailing presence of the format. The classical stillness of Vermeer, the palette of Rembrandt, the sometimes playful balance of coloured, contained spaces in Mondrian, the flattening of shapes a là Ben Nicholson, the delicacy and whimsy of Klee, the intuitive precision of Joseph Albers' saturated colour with a deep deference to Henri Matisse – all these elements come together in still, massive wholes which encapsulate that most prized pictorial and spatial quality in painting: that of monumentality."

- Zoe Earle Storrar Molteno

 

Van der Merwe considers the point at which the spoken word reaches its expressive limits, arriving, as George Steiner described, at "the shores of silence." Beyond rhetoric, beyond meaning and narrative, there exists a space where disciplines like music, mathematics, physics, and painting take root. For the artist, this silence is essential—an indefinable yet necessary threshold that enables his pursuit of visual form and beauty, where painting becomes a language of its own, beyond the constraints of language itself.

Address: 4 Franschhoek Square, Huguenot Street, Franschhoek

Tel: 021 876 4477