HAROLD VOIGT

(b. 1939 Johannesburg, South Africa, d. 2022 Johannesburg, South Africa)

Harold Voigt was born in 1939 and educated in Johannesburg, South Africa. He studied architecture before embarking on a brief career in advertising and film making. In 1971 he decide to make paintings his full-time profession. He designed and built a home on a mountain in the eastern Lowveld of the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa, where he lived and worked with his wife, Leigh, also an artist. He participated in group exhibitions nationally and internationally, and held several one-person exhibitions, most of them at Everard Read.

A painter of landscapes, abstract works and the human figure, Voigt concentrated on textural qualities, light and colour derived from the African Landscape. He used a wide range of mixed-media techniques, incorporating sand, marble dust, wax and oil. From 1974, he painted a series entitled "The Animal in Africa"; from 1975-79 "The African Landscape" ; from 1986 "The Female Figure" and from 1986 abstract work derived from the colours and textures of Africa.

‘As is true of all great colourists, it is the subtlety rather than the brilliance of colour that gives Voigt’s paintings their luminous glow. There are in fact very few identifiable colours in them, drawing their almost palpable light from the unified relationship between the subdued tones where each part is subordinate to the whole and transitions are as evocative as the colours themselves.

It has been said, and rightly so, that Voigt’s art is reminiscent of music. And indeed, if one looks at the pearly radiance of his early abstract paintings, one might easily take their chromatic variations in a single colour idea for the visual equivalent of a Bach cantata. As for the natural lyricism of his landscape paintings, the horizontal layers of colour with their smooth recession into space are perhaps more evocative of a mood which is akin to lyric poetry or verse of faintly shadowed vowel sounds, a poetry of which Mallarme once said: “La verite est dans une nuance” (The truth lies in a nuance).’

• GUNTER SCHLOSSER

EDUCATION

1957             Briefly studied architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand

1965 and 1972   Studied painting under Bill Ainslie (qv).

Worked as Creative Director of a Johannesburg advertising agency, and wrote and produced documentary and feature films before turning to full-time painting in 1973.  From 1974 he has been based in the Eastern Transvaal Lowveld.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

2021             Oasis, 25th Anniversary exhibition, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

                      Odyssey, group exhibition, Everard Read, South Africa & UK

2020             Staring Straight to the Future, online group exhibition, Everard Read, South Africa & UK

2019             Harold Voigt - A Retrospective of Paintings from 1972 to 2019, solo exhibition, Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa

2017             People & Portraiture, group exhibition, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

                      New works by Harold Voigt & Nic Bladen, Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa

2013             Recent Paintings, Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa

2002-13     Participated in several group shows at the Everard Read Gallery, South Africa

2002             Retrospective at Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa

1997             Solo exhibition Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa

1991             Solo exhibition, Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa

1987             Vita Art Now, Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa

1986             Solo exhibition, Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa

1979             Solo exhibition, Everard Read, Johannesburg, South Africa

1977             Solo exhibition, Pieter Wenning Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa

1973             Gallery 21, Johannesburg, first of six solo exhibitions in SA

1971             He participated in several group exhibitions from 1971 in Johannesburg