Jane Alexander

Born in Johannesburg in 1959, Jane Alexander lives and works in Townes. Since her beginnings in the 1980s, when South Africa was still under the apartheid regime, she has shown herself to be sensitive to socio-political issues and all forms and structures of the exercise of power, oppression and control.

Her sculptures are made with plaster, fiberglass, paint, found objects, occasionally bones, and "props" such as chairs, benches, ammunition, fences, machetes, and sickles. Her universe of man-animals exemplifies the range of motivations that guide human action and which range from rationality to instinct, relocating man within the animal world. 

Despite the local matrix of the themes underlying the artist's work, apartheid, post-colonial social and political changes and presumed democratization, the work overcomes thematic localism and results in a universal reflection on the growing global obsession for security and on new forms of oppression and isolation of ethnic groups and minorities. The humanoid figures convey a sense of depersonalization and annihilation: the human body with the head of a dog, monkey, bird or rabbit, the glassy gazes lost in space, almost seem like the realistic materialization of a dreamlike subconscious. The installation "African Adventure 1999-2002" is part of the permanent collection of the TATE Modern in London, in the section dedicated to Artistics and Society.