Born in 1976 in Johannesburg, South Africa, Vivien Kohler is an experimental mixed media painter. The concept of liminality; the liminal city and its people, lies at the core of Kohler’s work, which explores migration, marginalization and displacement in the urban landscape of post-Apartheid South Africa.
Kohler constructs two and three-dimensional assemblage pieces; appropriating discarded material, painting naturalistic figures and detailed replications of packaging material (a layered visual metaphor signifying transience, migration, displacement), to articulate challenging social and economic circumstances that affect those on the periphery. He captures with gentle rawness the complexity of the human disposition. His work seeks to illuminate the duality of lived experiences by depicting, with an air of surreality, the meditative moments of the individual, mentally cocooned from, yet physically enveloped by life’s detritus.