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RINA STUTZER

A SHORT BIO

Rina Stutzer, born in 1976, completed her MA (FA) with a distinction in Painting at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, where she was also a part time-lecturer for seven years. Apart from her private art practice, Stutzer forms part of the Dionysus Sculpture Works art studio and foundry, as a creative advisor and studio artist, based in Pretoria.

Stutzer works in variety of mediums which investigate and question ideas of permanence within the comprehensive theme of the ‘nomadic’ within a South African context. Her artworks currently explore the ‘ever-changing image’ through painting, sculpture and installation mediums.

Her most recent sculptural installation titled There is no Time Like the Present, is a super mirror stainless steel diptych of mirroring continents engaged in a visual dialogue, charged with an ever-changing present. Constructed over a two year period and completed in 2018, the installation is installed at the Mall of Africa in Midrand. Each structure measures 5.5 m high, 5.27 m wide and 2.3 m in depth. Stutzer has achieved a number of accolades in recognition for her painting and sculpting, and since 2000 has participated in numerous exhibitions across South Africa, as well as in Australia, France, Great Britain, India and The Netherlands.

She was awarded the Bettie Cilliers-Barnard Bursary from the University of Pretoria for excellence in painting in 1999 and attained first prize in the Ekurhuleni Fine Arts Award Competition in 2007. Stutzer was selected for the Rendezvous: Focus Painting award, comprising of a French residency at the Cité Internationale de Arts in Paris, in 2013. In 2014 she received the Southern Africa Stainless Steel Development Association (SASSDA) Art Project award for her permanent stainless steel installation titled Sway. In the same year she was invited to attend a residency at the Nirox Sculpture Park in the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2016 her soft sculpture installation, Pinned Transitory II, was selected as part of the South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, Reporting from the Front.