Born in 1989 in Cape Town, where she lives and works. She obtained her MFA degree from the Royal College of Art, London. In 2013, her work
was included in Bloomberg New Contemporaries and showcased at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. Marlene Steyn’s work is present in numerous public and private collections including the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), Cape Town, and was included in the museum’s inaugural exhibition in 2017. She is also the only African artist profiled in the Phaidon publication Vitamin C: Clay + Ceramic.
Marlene Steyn is known for her immersive, installation-based experiences, cultivating an expectation for her increasingly fantastic, constructed worlds. Her distinctive iconography takes shape through unsettling established ideas surrounding themes of psychoanalytic theory, certain historical narratives of art, as well as popular signifiers, borrowed from contemporary culture. Adept at choosing telling details, Steyn reviews familiar objects to create uncanny motifs through repetition and unpredictable combinations. Using anchor points such as the androgynous figure, the fried egg, and braided ropes of hair, Steyn reinforces the symbolic visual language that has become the cornerstone of her practice.
Selected exhibitions
2019 Deep She Dive Her, SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa
2019 Unbottoningmybelly, Lychee One Gallery, London
2018 Shouty Insides, Galerie DYS, Brussels
2018 Miart, Art Fair, Milan, Italy 2017 Another Antipodes, Urban Axis – PS Art Space, Fremantle, Australia
2017 Knot I: I Knot, SMAC Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
2016 Faces & Other Scenarios, Galerie DYS, Brussels
2016 New Monuments, Commune. 1, Cape Town