The Line of Beauty

In The Line of Beauty, his second solo exhibition with WHATIFTHEWORLD, Morné Visagie continues his affair with colour, and gestures towards the possibility of relations; an encounter between two anonymous figures in a changing room, an encounter between a pink circle and a deep blue background. His works on paper and sculptural collages appear as abstract notations, with a distinct vocabulary of form and colour. Among these descriptive installations and scenes, a sense of untouched silence is evoked. Like the flat colour backgrounds of his relief prints, Visagie’s installations present places or planes for chance meetings.

The exhibition’s title, The Line of Beauty, alludes to both the aesthetic theories of William Hogarth and to a novel of the same name by Alan Hollinghurst. It illustrates Visagie’s negotiation of abstraction and narrative, a tension apparent in the contrast between his collages and installations.

Morné Visagie (born 1989) is a South African artist who lives and works in Cape Town. Visagie graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2011 and was ranked one of the leading Young African Artists by Business Day WANTED in 2013, and has since participated in numerous exhibitions