Joshua MALAN

Joshua Malan is a young artist and aspiring printmaker from Cape Town. For many years Malan has had a deep love and appreciation for art and its impact on the individual as well as society at large. Since he was a young boy he had been aware of the profound affects that self expression has on a person’s psyche. This passion of his persisted and is what drove him to finally study fine art.

Much of, if not all of Malan’s inspiration comes from his untenable interest in both philosophy and psychology. With these two pillars culminating to form the bedrock of his practical approach as well as his subject matter. Some of the more major influences come directly from the ideas of artists and philosophers namely; the Surrealists who believed that dreams contained unknown information about one’s self.

Malan’s practical work consists of Collagraph prints which is an interesting printing method where one takes a variety of textures and collages them onto a single plate. Much of the iconography is that of familiar objects that have been removed from their original contexts and rearranged into new unfamiliar and dreamlike spaces. Many of the objects have been simplified in order to maximise their symbolic, and even their subconscious effect on the viewer.