Nathan Vuuren is a visual artist whose mediums of focus at present are painting, drawing and printmaking. He currently lives and works in Johannesburg.

Vuuren searches the internet and media for his source material. His painting process involves interpreting these images using carefully built up colour in a combination of glazes and layered paint.

Through painting, he has created an imagined personal world that mines its narratives from popular culture.

The reference material for Vuuren’s recent series of paintings are gleaned from social media.

Vuuren is obsessed with paintings and painting, for this series of work he had begun each canvas with a monochromatic base image as a means to ground the painting in the viewer’s eye, creating moments of recognition, he then begins to add painterly abstract intrusions, lines, splashes of paint and glazes of colour as well as using non traditional mediums such as markers or spray-paint.

He seeks to make unpredictable and new arrangements using these visual devices or interventions calling them ‘charged fragments’, with the intention of creating visual discord together with the underlying image.

“These images are less about narrative or identity and more about image construction. I’m interested in painting multiple figures and for this particular body of work I sought out images that depict mass ecstasy or what I would call a kind of secular worship. While I am always thinking about popular culture, consumerism and excess when selecting images to paint, most important to me is that I create an image that appeals to me,” said Vuuren.