Brett Murray is a South African artist known primarily for his satirically incisive sculptures and ‘The Spear’, a wildly infamous portrait of the nation’s former president, Jacob Zuma. His work functions as an introspective stocktake on the artist’s positionality within the social climate of South Africa at a particular moment, with which he aims to entertain.
 
Murray has a Master's degree in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town (1989) and was the winner of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 2002. Murray is one of South Africa’s most popular and sought-after visual artists, using recognisable media images with the addition of a subversive and bitterly funny twist.
 
Spanning bronze, steel, plastics, print, video and marble, Murray's work grapples with the wars of cultures, the clash between Afro- and Eurocentrism, the old and the new South Africas, identity politics and the ways in which political discussions have been shaped for the worse by social media.
 
Brett Murray studied at the University of Cape Town, where he was awarded his Masters of Fine Arts degree in 1988 with distinction. The title of Murray’s Masters dissertation was ‘A Group of Satirical Sculptures Examining Social and Political Paradoxes in the South African Context’. As an undergraduate, he was awarded Irma Stern Scholarships in both 1981 and 1982. He won the Simon Gerson Prize for the most promising student in 1982 and was awarded the Michaelis Prize in 1983. As a postgraduate student he received a Human Sciences Research Council bursary, a University of Cape Town Research Scholarship, the Jules Kramer Grant and an Irma Stern Scholarship.
 
He has exhibited extensively in South Africa and abroad. From 1991 to 1994 he established the sculpture department at the University of Stellenbosch, where he curated the show ‘Thirty Sculptors from the Western Cape’ in 1992. In 1995 he curated, with Kevin Brand, ‘Scurvy’ at the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town. That same year he co-curated ‘Junge Kunst Aus Zud Afrika’ for the Hänel Gallery in Frankfurt, Germany.
 
In 1999, Brett co-founded, with artists and cultural practitioners Lisa Brice, Kevin Brand, Bruce Gordon, Andrew Putter, Sue Williamson, Robert Weinek and Lizza Littlewort, ‘Public Eye’, a Section 27 company that manage and initiate art projects in the public arena with the aims to develop a greater profile for public art in Cape Town. They initiated projects on Robben Island; worked with the city’s health officials on HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns; and initiated outdoor sculpture projects including ‘The Spier Sculpture Biennale’. He curated ‘Homeport’ in 2001, which saw 15 artists create site specific text-based works in Cape Town’s Waterfront precinct.
 
Murray was included on the Cuban Biennial of 1994 and subsequently his works were exhibited at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Germany. He participated in the group show, ‘Springtime in Chile’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile. He was also part of the travelling show ‘Liberated Voices, Contemporary Art from South Africa’ which opened at the Museum for African Art in New York in 1998. He won the Cape Town Urban Art competition in 1998 that resulted in the public work ‘Africa’, a 3.5 metre bronze sculpture, being erected in Cape Town’s city centre. His work formed part of the shows ‘Min(d)fields’ at the Kunsthaus in Baselland, Switzerland in 2004 and ‘The Geopolitics of Animation‘ at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Seville in Spain in 2007.
 
Murray won, with Stefaans Samcuia, the commission to produce an 8 x 30 metre wall sculpture for the foyer of the Cape Town International Convention Centre in 2003. In 2007 he completed ‘Specimens’, a large wall sculpture for the University of Cape Town’s medical school campus. In 2011 he produced the public artwork ‘Seeds’ for the University of Bloemfontein and in 2013 he was commissioned to produce the 7 metre seven-metre bronze ‘Citizen’ for the Auto & General Park in Johannesburg.