Origin Art: Chantal Coetzee Presents African Queens – Restoring History

Origin Art, together with Cape Town artist Chantal Coetzee, unveil a compelling new artistic endeavour… Her latest body of work centres around the captivating theme of African Queens. This collection features meticulously crafted portraits that pay homage to historically significant individuals who once held the esteemed title of Queen among their respective African communities during bygone eras.

“African Queens: Restoring History”

Portraits by Chantal Coetzee

Curated by James Sey

The term ‘African Queen’ has become something of a pop culture honorific, a term not only of endearment but of empowerment, alluding to the strength, charisma and resilience of ordinary African women who rise above their circumstances with grace.

Cape Town-based artist Chantal Coetzee has produced a powerful new body of work whose subjects are literally African Queens, a collection of portraits of meticulously researched historical subjects, all of whom were Queens of their people in various parts of Africa in past centuries, comprising a fascinating social and political history consistently suppressed by subsequent generations of patriarchy and colonialism.

The title points to the key element of the exhibition. It uses allegorical portraiture as a means to establish a series of revisionist histories – more accurately, herstories – to address the active suppression and neglect of these important historical figures in most colonial and patriarchal accounts. The portraits of the Queens therefore act as African History Paintings, a subversion of the European painting genre used in the Enlightenment to valorize and document nobility and influential European figures.