Davina de Beer (b. 1982, Johannesburg) is a South African visual artist based in Spain and South Africa.

Davina graduated from the University of the Free State with a Masters Degree in Fine Art in 2008. She lived and worked in Oman, in the Middle East, for thirteen years before relocating to Spain in 2022.

My mixed media painting practice is founded on my curiosity of the experience of space and how it connects to memory and identity, a concept possibly triggered by my time spent abroad. My paintings and drawings linger between the representational and abstract, the organic and the geometric. It searches for liminal spaces that offer a pause, a threshold, an uncertainty.

I work primarily in paint on different substrates, like canvas, paper or unprepared pattern cotton fabric, but I also make use of mixed media, like found pamphlets, thread and local textiles. My work strongly relies on colour; it glows in the Technosublime series where a bright, unnatural palette emphasises the digital nature of the theme, in contrast with the Anomia portrait series in different whites that speak of anonymity and absence. In my current studio work I use muted colours alongside vivid blues and greens in paintings informed by patterns found in tile designs in Andalusia, Spain. The subdued colours together with dripping paint and faded imagery speak of memory and loss.

Davina has had two solo exhibitions in the Middle East, the first in Dubai at Gallery 76 in 2011, and the second during the lockdown of 2020 in Muscat, Oman, at Gallery Sarah. Due to the pandemic the exhibition was both virtual and physical. Davina has participated extensively in group exhibitions in South Africa and in Oman, as well as in art fairs in Oman, Spain and Monaco, and had her first art residency at Joya: arte + ecologica in 2016 in Spain.

Davina is the co-founder of Non-Site Art Collective, alongside fellow South African artist Adelheid Frackiewicz.

Click here to request a catalogue of available work.