Booyens’ work is often described in terms of a struggle between the representational and abstract, the rational and chaotic. An affinity and critical engagement with Modernism is coupled with his relationship to the South African landscape, both social and physical.

For his latest work, Booyens has affected subtle iconographic shift from forms that allude of the art historical ‘landscape’ to those of the ‘still life’. Booyens’s flower like-forms explode in abstract compositions and assemblages of studio detritus, where form and colour fracture and falter in 70’impasto kitch, Stella stripes, colour supernovas and jpeg disintegration.

Booyens has been described as “a forerunner of a new kind of formalism in local art”. Born in Johannesburg in 1980, he lives and works between Cape Town and Pretoria. He studied at the Durban Institute of Technology and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, and currently teaches in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Stellenbosch. Booyens is also one-third of the infamous artist collective Avant Car Guard. His work is part of numerous collections, including the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris. Solo exhibitions include ‘The Matt Sparkle’ (Whatiftheworld, Cape Town 2008), ‘People Used To Dream About The Future’ (artSPACE Berlin 2009) and ‘Tectonic’ (Whatiftheworld, Cape Town 2010). His previous show at blank, ‘Strange Days’, was held in April 2012.