A lesson on South African Artist Jane Alexander

2. • Style: Surrealist Sculpture
• Medium: Plaster, Fibre Glass
• Fun Fact: Sculpture Professor at the Michealis School of
Fine Art
• Quote: my themes are drawn from the relationship of
individuals to hierarchies and the presence of aggression,
violence, victimisation, power and subservience, and from
the paradoxical relationships of these conditions to each
other. The content I work with is derived from a
combination of observation, media information and the
experience

3. Some Best Known Work
• 1. One of the Butcher Boys
• 2. African Adventure
• 3. At the Frontier With Ghosts
• 4. The Butcher Boys

4. Short Biography
• Jane Alexander is a South African artist, born and is raised in South Africa during
Apartheid. She obtained her Bachelors and Masters in fine Art at the University of
Witwatersrand and is known by her famous piece called the Butcher Boys.
• Alexander was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1959. Growing up, she was
not too aware of all the political issues that surrounded her, but upon the time she
entered university and moved to Braamfontein she became more aware of the
social and political issues that were present in South Africa. Her interest in these
issues influenced her future art pieces.
• Alexander attended the University of the Witwatersrand where she obtained a
Bachelors degree and a Masters in Fine Arts in 1982 and 1988. During the course
of her Masters, Alexander produced one of her most recognisable pieces of art;
The Butcher Boys. The Butcher Boys is a sculpture of three men sitting on a
bench that have peculiar appearances made out of plaster. In an article in the
New York Times, Holland Cotter describes that "their bodies, white-skinned and
muscular, are superb, but with suture lines running from navel to throat, also
disturbing". Alexander currently lectures on sculpture, photography and drawing at
the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town.

5. • Alexander works by building
her figures up in plaster on a
variety of frameworks, adding
found elements like bone or
horns. In the case of the "Oh
Yes" Girl, a lace collar is
embedded into the figure's
shoulders. Oil colours tint the
flesh. In recent years, many of
the figures have been dressed
in purchased or specially
made clothes.
• Medium used is usually
plaster and

6. Themes of Alexanders Work
• Violence
• Poverty
• aggression
• Victimisation
• power
• Social and Political Issues
• Historical Issues and subject matter

7. Interests
• sculpture, and works mainly with figurative sculpture
installation
• tableaux,
• photomontage.
• Her research interests include migration, security, and
contemporary art production in Africa and the Diaspora.

8. Interesting Facts
• In her first solo show since 1996, Jane Alexander will
show '"Bom Boys" and "Lucky girls"' at the UCT Irma
Stern Museum in Cape Town in July, bringing together a
body of work which has occupied the artist over the past
two years. her early collages of a naked German boy in
Nazi Germany display the concern she has always felt for
the effect of society on children. The "Bom Boys" - the title
is taken from gang graffiti -

9. Sculptures

10. Photomantage

11. Butcher Boys

13. At the Frontier With Ghosts

14. Bom Boys