Heidi Fourie, full-time artist and part-time lecturer from Pretoria, completed her BA Fine Arts (cum laude) in 2012 at the University of Pretoria, specialising in painting, where she received the Bettie Cilliers Barnard bursary. She has had five solo exhibitions:  Islands (2015) at Lizamore & Associates Gallery (Johannesburg); Borrowed Scenery, (2016) at Salon91 Gallery (Cape Town); Masses (2017), at Fried Contemporary (Pretoria); Lilac Chaser (2018) at Salon 91 (Cape Town) and her latest solo presentation, Grass You can Swim In (2021) with David Krut Projects, showing her venture into printmaking. In 2019 she became a fellow of the Ampersand Foundation which resulted in a month-long residency in New York, NY in July 2019. A month long residency in May 2022 at David Krut Projects, at Arts on Main, Johannesburg, resulted in a showcase of work titled, “On soft ground” in July 2022 at David Krut Projects, Parkwood. She is currently working on a solo exhibition that will take place in August 2023 at 99 Loop gallery, Cape Town.

“My work is led by an intuitive process of contemplation, observation and openness to organic processes of the natural world and the spaces we occupy. Walking in, (and sometimes crawling through) natural environments is seminal to my process and feeds my visual vocabulary. I hope to foster a curiosity and appreciation for inexplicable cycles, creatures, and dramas playing out within rocky crevices, grass fields, forests and ravines, and perhaps inspire a conscious, and later habitual, perceptiveness. I also hope to encourage the preservation of the wild places left in the world, and the beings that inhabit them

I hope to be a conduit through which paint and ink can move how it wishes, within frameworks I set out with the help of collected imagery from the natural spaces I have access to. I am curious to uncover some of the countless mark-making and representational possibilities of pigment, binder and solvent solutions and applications. To me, painterly marks not only make up subjects but are subjects in themselves. I delight in observing how, like gorges and glaciers, fuelled by gravity and densities, solvents can carve paths through colourful particles until they settle and set. 

I veer away from straight lines and linear paths, embracing lyrical loops and winding paths with multiple possible outcomes. Figures become one with painterly backdrops and transparent layers reveal a space beyond the pigment veil.”