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Dee Donaldson was born in a small town in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and completed her National Higher Diploma in Fine Art at Durban University of Technology, graduating with distinction. She lives and works in Durban, where she maintains a full-time studio practice and leads masterclasses out of Studio3 as well as workshops and retreats in various parts of South Africa and Namibia.
Working primarily in oil, charcoal, and pastel, Donaldson’s practice explores the physical and conceptual entanglement of human connection. Her recent works draw upon classical Baroque composition and sculpture, stripping historical forms of their original iconography to examine contemporary themes of empathy, vulnerability and fragility. Through a process of layering, dissolving, and chaotic ordering, her figurative compositions attempt to capture the fleeting tension between contact and unravelling - a practice further developed during a residency at Three Bones in Constantia, Cape Town in May this year ( 2026).
Donaldson is a past recipient of the prestigious Emma Smith Overseas Scholarship and the Reeves Prize. Over a career spanning more than three decades, she has exhibited in South Africa, Europe, and the United States, including exhibitions at Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris and Rust-en-Vrede Gallery in Cape Town. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections internationally, including official portrait commissions for the University of Natal and University of Zululand.
Out of Hand, 2026
Virginia MacKenny, Emeritus Associate Professor of Painting, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
Dee Donaldson’s exhibition ‘Out of Hand’ is an engaged response to the complexities of alienation and disassociation in a time of severe global crises.
Donaldson’s work is an attempt to grapple with the body and its desires and conflicts. In the paintings and pastels, moving between figuration and abstraction, almost every work amasses forms that vie for our attention by occupying the centre of the format - a space that quickly becomes a painterly equivalent of a boxing or wrestling ring. At times the massing of forms seems more like a cluster of rocks or boulders, something elemental and inchoate, not yet determined in its shape.
At others, elements evolve out of the painterly matrix, twist and writhe and coalesce as a bundle of human forms - silhouettes of figures, backs and shoulders, a head. Particularities begin to emerge - buttocks and legs catch light, a face is hinted at. The consistent palette of soft pinks, peach and oranges, sienna and Naples Yellow evoke the flesh of the embattled Caucasian body - often Rubenesque in feeling. The temperature of colour occasionally sets a higher pitch - red or cerise unsettle our gaze and speak to a violence that permeates the series. The vulnerability of these pale fleshly forms is reiterated through their mutability. As the shapes settle into vestiges of human form the groupings bundle into compositions that in turn evoke events - blurring into a crucifixion, collapsing into a deposition or evoking the fall of the damned into hell - a lexicon of Christian iconography.
Drawing from the rich canon of Western painting with reference to iconic Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Caravaggio works Donaldson’s practice both salutes and disassembles them. Such references are an attempt on the artist’s part to confront the larger journey of humankind over history and to consider and reflect on where we find ourselves - amid a death struggle that emerges from a systemic collapse of society as we have understood and known it.
What might emerge remains unknown. Coming to grips with a world that has got ‘Out of Hand’ is perhaps only possible by being conscious of what emerges from the intuition of the hand, from touch or intimacy. The series of elemental charcoal drawings titled Strange Love renders simpler groupings of two or three figures knit in various embrace. Proximity here is more complex than the overt struggle - in the melding of forms such closeness might mask a hidden threat. Calling to mind the many saints and sages that populated Baroque paintings these figures function to provide a portal into another world - one fuelled by concerns beyond physical survival, beyond the mortalities of war.
These ruminations on the collision of bodies are in essence a reflection on the conflicts of our contemporary times.