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Dee Donaldson is a South African painter, whose career spans over three decades of exhibiting nationally and internationally. She trained at the KwaZulu-Natal Technikon, completing her National Higher Diploma in Fine Art (Painting) with distinction in 1990.
Donaldson has held numerous solo exhibitions throughout her career, including Wednesday 16:43 and Undertow at THE FOYER @ Studio3, and Scratching the Surface and her earlier Journeys exhibition at the Natal Society of the Arts Gallery. Her group exhibition history is extensive, with work shown at galleries including Christopher Moller Gallery and Rust-en-Vrede Gallery in Cape Town, artSPACEdurban, KZNSA Gallery in Durban, and internationally at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and galleries in Stuttgart and Savannah, Georgia.
Her accolades include winning the KZNSA Members' Portrait Exhibition in 2006, as well as the Reeves Prize and the Emma Smith Overseas Scholarship, both awarded during her studies. She has also completed several public portrait commissions, including works held by the University of Natal and the 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.