Johannes Phokela

While Johannes Phokela’s work is, at first glance, an irreverent representation of Western art history, it is the cultural and political consumption of pictures that interests him most. He is a voracious consumer of imagery, drawing not only on the iconic works of the European Masters – Rubens, Van Dyck, Caravaggio – but also on newspapers, magazines and the Internet. His is an ambitious exploration of the import of received art history on the one hand and the seemingly endless proliferation of images in popular culture on the other.