‘Norman Catherine's prodigious career spans more than 50 years and has straddled the most formative periods in South African contemporary art, from the '70's through the end of the last millennium and into the youth of this one. His oeuvre includes painting sculpture, printmaking and mixed media.His nutrients have, at times, included the cultural equivalent of junk food: pop culture, comic books, cartoons, sci-fi movies, pulp fiction; and, whether deliberately or inadvertently, like all South Africans, he has subsisted on a daily diet of news reports reflecting the violence, brutality, corruption, and dandified revelry of an empire dangling on the edge of the precipice. In short, his art has both depicted and mitigated South Africa's growing pains and it fractured psyche.’   - Hazel Friedman, 2013

Since his first 1969 solo exhibition, consisting of oil paintings on wood, bone, wire and an assortment of found objects, Norman Catherine's art has since undergone "several metamorphoses, from the pristine airbrush paintings of the 70s to the frenzied, ritualistic mixed media works of the early and mid 80s; the wire sculptures and tin can works of the late 80s, and the primitive-futuristic paintings of the early 90s which provided the seeds for his pre-millennial menagerie of anthropomorphic beasts. In the years spanning his past and present output, Catherine's visual trademarks have included rough-edged comical and nightmarish forms, rendered in brash cartoon colours. His idiosyncratic vision - a combination of dark cynicism and exuberant humour, as well as his innovative use of everyday materials, has secured his place at the forefront of South African contemporary art" (Hazel Friedman).

Norman Catherine’s art imbibes a dystopian vision of the socio-political landscape that informs his psyche. History, horror, crime, conflict, psychoses, politics & pathologies serve as stimuli for his creative output that vacillates between the macabre and the comic, between a gasp and a giggle. He conveys his cynical vision through a juxtaposition of dark and light sensibilities veering between an internal hallucinatory realm and literal commentary on the material world. There are no easy classifications for the genre of his work suffice to say that he rebels against any dogma or rigid definition.

Catherine has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally. His work is included in public and corporate collections in South Africa and internationally including the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City.