#RhonaGorvy Born 1921 / Passed 2016. This year saw us loose the beautiful spirit Rhona Gorvy . This lady was more than an artist, she was a Mother, a wife, a lover, a friend, a woman, an artist ……..with all her soul and spirit…..Rhona was a creator, and she left a great legacy of artworks for us to listen and learn from . Each #RhonaGorvy work was a personal tail of love, life and struggle, a condition known as human, a personal journey shared in pictures and poetry. We were fortunate enough to

have spent time with Rhona in the last few years of her life and documented much of this exceptional ladies thoughts and gifts both on camera in stills and video. Thank you Rhona for opening up your soul to share what 93 years of life had taught you, we will respectfully continue to tell your story and although you are no longer down the road , you are deap in our hearts and homes!
A life lived. A story still being told.
RIP Mrs Gorvy. We will miss you.
All of us at the#ArtEyeGalleryteam!
#ArtEyeGallery#AETheLaunchPad#AETheStudio

Please read her Biography below

Rhona Gorvy was born in Springs, Transvaal, South Africa 1921; she grew up in Johannesburg and completed her B.A. Diploma in Logopaedics, Speech and Hearing Therapy, at the University of the Witwatersrand, 1944. She worked as a supervisor at the Speech and Hearing Clinic and later lectured in Speech Pathology, also at the University of the Witwatersrand (1945-47). In relation to her art, Gorvy was largely self-taught. She had expressed herself through different art forms from an early age, and when she was at the Witwatersrand University, her passion for, and experimentation in art, grew further, and she attended the George Boys School of Visual Arts (1966-70). She has also studied under Joyce Leonard, (1968), Guisseppi Cataneo (1971) and Liz Harrington (1983). Over the last 70 odd years, Gorvy has produced an oeuvre of sketches, prints, paintings, sculpture and poetry that document her intense and empathetic experience of the inner and outer world. She has engaged with a wide range of themes relating to life and the human condition; e.g.- exploring motherhood, loss,, abuse, addiction, and conscious and subconscious processes. At the age of 91 she continues to produce sensitive and compelling work.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2011 GIBS Foyer, Johannesburg, South Africa, curated by John Malherbe
2006 Art on Paper, Johannesburg, South Africa
1988 Galerie Salammbo, Paris, France
1983 Bullocks, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
1981 Art Dimensions, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
1975 Natal Society of Arts, Durban, South Africa
1971 Gallery International, Cape Town, South Africa
1970 Helen de Leeuw Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa,
Natal Society of Arts, Durban, South Africa.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
(inter alia)

2011 RCHCC, Johannesburg, South Africa
2010 Joburg Child Welfare 100 Doors of Hope
1998 S A Jewish Women Artists, JCC, Houston, U.S.A.
1994 International Gallery of Contemporary Printmaking, Philadelphia,
U.S.A.
1993 Shaman Show, Finland, Momentum Art, Pretoria, South Africa
1986-1994 Selected for the annual Show of Miniatures, Toronto, Canada
1973 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London, U.K.
1969 New Signatures exhibition, Pretoria (Drawing award)
1966 Republic Arts Festival, Pretoria, South Africa.

COLLECTIONS

South African Embassy, Washington, U.S.A.
Constitutional Court, Johannesburg, South Africa.
University of Potchefstroom, South Africa.
Lichtenburg Municipal Gallery, South Africa.
Jewish Board of Deputies, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Greatermans Collection, Cape Town, South Africa.
Private collections: Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany,
Israel, South Africa, U.S.A.

Rhona Gorvy has documented much of her life, in a variety of artistic
expressions. Growing up with her only brother and mother who was widowed
when she was a few months old, Gorvy recalls a box of crayons that was as
precious to her as priceless jewels.
This small box of crayons became instrumental to her a young child,
beginning to express herself in art form.

Gorvy’s oeuvre of work, much of which is not precisely dated, spans over
the last 70 years. She has captured almost everything that has touched
her life: members of her family, her pets, places she has traveled
through, and also her own grappling with the haunting questions of what it
means to be human. This sense of intense empathy and deep connection with
her subjects and themes is what makes Gorvy’s enormous archive of work
remarkable. She seems to have an innate ability to capture something
beyond the surface in little more than a line drawing: abstracting the
human psyche and body, at times at an archetypal level, into an
emotional realm.

As an artist who is very versatile and has worked in a variety of media,
such as sculpture, painting and poetry, she has also been able to focus
on graphics and printmaking. In addition, she has produced multiple
versions of images on a similar theme resulting in a focus, which can be
best appreciated in relation to the entire oeuvre. These approaches to
making art, which have resulted in an archive of almost 15 000 artworks,
characterise Gorvy’s level of engagement with the human condition and her
fervent need to understand through different art forms.