DAVID BRITS

Artist

When I make a bronze sculpture, I am very conscious of the fact that I am making an object that can survive 6 000 years into the future,’ explains artist david Brits. ‘I don’t so much aim to fleetingly attract a viewer’s attention as much as move something very ancient, primal and unchanging in them.’ It might be a counterintuitive approach in our instant-gratification, Tl;dr culture climate but david’s onto something here. In these works, he’s creating an unbroken, seamless line curving and twisting through space, something that is at once primeval and innovative. or as he calls them: ‘an embodiment of the impossible’. But this fascination with the permanent doesn’t make him phobic of the ephemerality of a snapchat. It’s the casual ease of living with this dichotomy of creating works with salience but still feeding the digital maw that makes david a proto-creative for gen Z. ‘Creating material in relation to one’s art practice is critical to keeping an artist’s audience growing and engaged and I do this through platforms such as Instagram stories where I document the complex processes and constant experimentation that characterise my work,’ he says. ‘It is important for me to share my artistic journey in a way that is informative of the great labour inherent, yet often invisible when viewing the work of art.’ his view on diversification follows a similarly nonconformist nature (you can spot his murals throughout the gorgeous george hotel that opens early 2019 as well as on a collection with fashion brand good good good). ‘Collaborations are never about outcomes for me,’ he insists, saying that the process is a protracted one born out of a kind of creative kinship that results in a one-plus-one-equals-three equation. ‘I’ve failed many times and I am continuing to fail in projects,’ he says, ‘but as I spend more time in the saddle, my fear of this failure diminishes. I think that may be the art of maturing.’