Barend de Wet

Barend de Wet was born in Boksburg in 1956, and towards his untimely death had long become an emblematic figure of the artist, the possibilities of the playfulness in the creative act and the ostensible freedoms of an artistic life within the city of Cape Town where he was based. De Wet’s oeuvre, straddling nearly forty years, encompasses traditional sculptural media mostly in metal work, performances involving nudism, craft skills and fanatical hobbyism, and wall-based ‘knittings’, gaudy coloured canvasses comically clothed in knitting, crochet and embroidery.