Joe Turpin was a Top 3 finalist in the 2019 Cassirer Welz Award and a 2022 recipient of the Stutzman Foundation First Year MFA Fine Arts Awards for Three-Dimensional Art.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
As a multidisciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa, I use archival research to locate narratives, allegories and semiotics that are charged and informed by historical events or mythologies.
These fables influence my current focus on paintings and mixed media installations. I question how these narratives that reflect the past and present, also resonate within a wider social context, initiating forms of activism that bring people together.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Joe Turpin (b.1995 in Johannesburg) is a South African visual artist whose research practice focuses on historically charged narratives and semiotics as expansions of painting. Joe makes mixed-media installations grounded in painting that create temporal conversations about identity, memory, and history.
His Jewish heritage becomes principal and consequential in exploring stories of migration and persecution. These cultural paradigms
inform his archival research and artistic production. Turpin graduated from the Pratt Institute in New York in 2023 with an MFA in Painting & Drawing, and from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 2018 with a BA in Fine Art.
