.png){kind=small}
Louisemarié
Combrink
Biography
Dr Louisemarié Combrink holds a PhD in History of Art from the NWU. She is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the North-West University, as well as subject chair and MA Manager of History of Art. Her research interests include visual narratology with emphasis on installation art, as well as practice-led research and gender. She exhibits frequently, and her current fine art interest is driven by themes of conflict, war and GBV.
She has supervised 20 MA-studies and two PhD’s in fields such as photography, painting, art theory and 3D animation. As a practicing artist, she has curated a number of national exhibitions.
Dr Combrink has delivered numerous conference papers, nationally and internationally. She has published in national and international journals, as well as numerous other publications. She is also a frequent speaker at events such as art exhibitions. She serves on the Faculty Board of Humanities at the North-West University and the Visual Arts Advisory Board of VUT, and is the chair of the Visual Arts Commission of the South African Academy for Science and the Arts. She has twice been an adjudicator for the Helgaard Steyn Fine Arts Award (the largest art prize in South Africa).
Homage to Magritte
Homage to Magritte consists of a multimedia painting made with stretched canvas and book covers, as well as three sculptural pieces that accompany the painting. Using the riddle paintings by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte as structural and conceptual framework, this work, like Magritte’s, speaks by means of irony. I used this device to portray fragments of images of war, particularly cognizant of the Gaza genocide that is broadcast on our screens with dreadful regularity. My work draws attention to the suffering of children and women during war.
Magritte’s conceptual approach explains the title of the painting: Homage to Magritte. In my painting, the French word for house (La Maison) accompanies an image of rubble; likewise, childhood (L’enfance) is grimly represented by a piece of candy in a wrapper, that reminds of the appearance of a child’s corpse wrapped in plastic.
The sculptural pieces extend this theme – a wrapped object is topped by a pair of pink girl’s shoes, suggesting absence; a small bundle with a childlike effigy showing infant martyrdom, and a stack of books wrapped in Plaster of Paris speak of lost memories, stories and knowledge.