Paul stopforth steve biko biography

Paul Stopforth is a painter and graphic artist who focusses on portraits and human figures. He works in oil, gouache, ink, charcoal, metal and the encaustic processes as well as in lithography.

Stopforth's 1980 series of 20 drawings based on the death of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko are among the great artworks produced in protest to the apartheid regime.

Paul stopforth steve biko biography south africa

Paul Stopforth was one of the first visual artists to confront the injustices of the apartheid system through his work which evidence a particular kind of witnessing and testimony in relation to apartheid-era interrogation and torture, and to the deaths in detention to which these practices led.

Paul Stopforth focuses on areas of the body, or on details of an environment, which at first seem banal but on closer examination reveal much about the subject matter and the artist's own beliefs.

In 1988 Stopforth and his wife Carol Marshall immigrated to Boston in the United States.

At the time, disillusion