Kim Berman

Kim Berman is Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the Technikon Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and is the Director of The Artist Proof Studio in Newtown, Johannesburg. Kim Berman received her B.F.A. from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1981 and her M.F.A. in printmaking from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, Mass, USA, in 1989. In 1991,together with Nhlanhla Xaba, she founded the Artist Proof Studio, a community printmaking Centre in Newtown (Johannesburg), which provides training and studio facilities to emerging artists.

In 2000 she initiated Phumani Paper, a national poverty relief project funded by the Department of Science and Technology. This is a research and training based project at the Technikon that implements research and technology innovations by graduate students for rural development. Phumani Paper has set up 20 papermaking projects in seven provinces of South Africa.

Kim Berman has lectured and exhibited widely in South Africa, Europe and the United States and is represented in South Africa by the Goodman Gallery, where she has held a number of successful solo exhibitions.

Berman is a hugely energetic person who is deeply committed to political and social transformation in South Africa. She uses printmaking as a vehicle to reflect on the social and political processes that surround her. She has the uncanny ability to take a neglected, peripheral landscape and to transform it into an image that not only comments on society but is also transformed into something beautiful and poignant. Berman transforms the existential crisis of the landscape reflected in "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett into a tangible image.

She has long been concerned with fire and its ability to destroy and create. Her one sister was badly burnt in a car accident and she lost her work partner, Nhlanhla Xaba, when the The Artist Proof studio that they had established, was destroyed by fire in 2003. Berman's analysis of fire is not a flippant or superficial one.

Artists statement:

"Through the Wire, Lowveld Fires" I, II, III (triptych)

The three lithographs are based on a series of monotypes and are printed from 8 or 11 colour plates per lithograph, on Rives BFK paper.
"Through the Wire Lowveld Fires" refers back to the series of that I have been working on using fire a smoke on as a metaphor for social change in South Africa. The fire symbolises a process of burning and purging to make way for new growth, while the smoke chokes and suffocates the truth.

The introduction of barbed wire in this series represents a barrier that recalls the symbolic landscape of apartheid. There is a tension between the transparent layering and political deception or betrayal of the broken promises of a "new South Africa".
Kim Berman 2003

Berman's first fire prints that she did at The Artists' Press in 1999 are concerned with the Truth and Reconciliation Comission hearings that were taking place at the time in South Africa under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

The Truth Comission went some way towards purging South Africa's traumatic past but was limited to certain elements, this is referenced in Berman's titles and imagery.

Artists

New Editions

Ponds (2005)

Fires (2003)