ABOUT THE ARTIST

Andrew Kayser (b. 1975, East London, South Africa) is a Cape Town-based painter whose work explores the psychological terrain of the suburban landscape — that middle-class ideal of comfort, perpetually undermined by the effort required to maintain it. His paintings suggest a collision of inner and outer realities, where meaning is fleeting and intimately personal. Focusing on themes of doubt, ambiguity and contradiction, Kayser never intercedes on behalf of the viewer. All interpretations are welcome.

Kayser graduated from the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague, Netherlands in 2001 and went on to participate in several exhibitions in and around the Netherlands before returning to South Africa in 2005.

Following a lengthy struggle with alcoholism, Kayser regained sobriety and resumed his professional practice in 2014. In 2017 he held his first solo exhibition, At Home After Dark, at Kalashnikovv Gallery in Johannesburg — the beginning of a sustained body of work in mixed media and drawing rooted in a rigorous, highly detailed practice that remains an anchor — a daily discipline of sketching that continues to underpin the paintings even as the work has grown more deliberately painterly.

The year 2020 marked a turning point. Confined to his studio in Johannesburg's CBD during South Africa's COVID-19 lockdown, Kayser made his first committed move into oil painting — bringing a draughtsman's discipline and precision to a medium that rewarded both. The lockdown works — large, densely populated, psychologically charged — announced a new register in his practice. In 2023, this shift was consolidated with his fifth solo exhibition, Fragments of Longer Stories, at Graham Contemporary in Johannesburg.

Kayser's work has been shown at international art fairs including Untitled Art Miami Beach; AKAA Art and Design Fair, Paris; 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, London; London Art Fair; Enter Art Fair, Copenhagen; Cologne Fine Art and Design;  Investec Cape Town Art Fair and Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair. In 2026, Kayser was awarded an Ampersand Foundation Fellowship, undertaking a residency in New York City.

His work is held in private collections across South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands.