Deborah Poynton

Born in Durban, South Africa in 1970, her parents founded and ran an anti-apartheid conference centre and died when she was a child.[2] Poynton grew up in South Africa, England, Swaziland and the United States, often moving to different boarding schools.[2]

Poynton knew from the start that she wanted to be an artist.[3] Before returning to South Africa to paint, she attended the Rhode Island School of Design for two years between 1987 and 1989, but did not graduate.[4][5]

Poynton's paintings are more about the act of looking, of exposing the "trickery" behind traditional artistic practices, than they are windows onto a surreal world. By constructing spaces, placing slightly discordant objects amongst seemingly natural landscapes, Poynton creates a tension within her work that is intended to make the viewer uncomfortably aware of the act of perception. While most of her work can be categorized as realism, a few series depart from her usual aesthetic in a more abstract project. Her current exhibition, Scenes of a Romantic Nature, draws on her connection to Germany by referencing the landscape paintings of German artist Caspar David Friedrich.[6]

Her work often conflates tropes from traditional art history, from compositional techniques to poses of her subjects, and the indices of contemporary life to create a sense of chaotic inscrutability; in this way, Poynton creates work which is aesthetically engaging and intellectually confounding. This quality of her work is exemplified in her series Safety & Security, 2006.[7]