Stephen Rautenbach

Stephen was born in Durban, South Africa in 1976. He studied fine art for three years at Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth. His Majors were sculpture and printmaking.

He is currently working and living in Stellenbosch in the Western Cape, South Africa. He travels between Italy and Stellenbosch, SA.

He recently had four and a half years of teaching experience, teaching sculpture at Somerset College. He resigned from teaching at the end of 2009 to start his Studio Gallery and do sculpting full time.

His sculpture reflects his fascination with dynamics of movement, light and composition. He loves doing sculpture studies of people, animals, birds and Fish.

Stephen enjoy exploring the emotional humanistic content he perceives in animals, their personalities, as well as their relationship and integration with people and our changing, natural environment.

He is developing short stories with his sculpture, through life- like studies of animals and birds.

Sculptures, images supported by short rhyming verse, with influences from reading books as a child. He also loves nonsense poetry, and artists like Albrecht Durer, William Turner and William Blake. Themes have an underlying irony and wry sense of humour.

Animal sculptures, owls and birds become characters, personalities and symbols that are international and cross cultural with varying interpretations.

Within the theme of people; classical portraiture studies of historical figures, Stephen also enjoys therianthropy and mythology, leaning towards surrealism with human form.