Ron Sauerman
Bachelors in Visual Arts (Fine Art)
Stellenbosch University
Graduates: 2024
Specialisms: Fine Art / Painting / Installation/Sculpture
My location: Cape Town, South Africa
Ron Sauerman
First Name: Ron
Last Name: Sauerman
University / College: Stellenbosch University
Course / Program: Bachelors in Visual Arts (Fine Art)
Graduates: 2024
Specialisms: Fine Art / Painting / Installation/Sculpture
My Location: Cape Town, South Africa
About
Ron Sauerman (b. 2002, South Africa) is a bookbinder, fine arts painter, and graduate of Stellenbosch University with a BA in Visual Fine Arts (cum laude). His practice spans multiple disciplines, exploring the materiality and metaphor of the body through bookmaking and bookbinding techniques. Sauerman integrates abstract and figurative painting on found boards, which he breaks into book-sized objects. He also incorporates materials such as concrete and plywood as conceptual and material devices in his installations. Focusing on his transmasculine experience, Ron’s work investigates how identity is perceived and interpreted. Through themes of texture, legibility, skin, scars, materiality, and vulnerability, his work comments on the complexities of identity, self, and the body.
How do we read people? Do you scan across the room from afar, only looking at the surface of who people are? To use the book-body metaphor, do we only read their titles? Or do you take them out of the bookcase and look at the stains, torn pages, the textures, the wanted and the unwanted scars? And then what do we do with those perceptions? Do we act on them? If a book cover feels rough to the touch and manages to pierce your skin, do we drop it out of instinct? And do we brush our fingertips more carefully when engaging with a book we’d like to touch. Through book arts, painting, and installation, I use the metaphor of the body as a book to delve into how bodies are read and understood. Within this body of work, I use my own trans masculine body as an entry point and investigate how it is read and interpreted by society. Skin serves as both a literal and symbolic substrate that represents layers of identity that are both legible and illegible. By abstracting these elements, I aim to highlight the materiality and the complexities of the body and question who gets to read and who is being read.
Competitions
