Happy Birthday Jesus!

Declaring Christmas to be Jesus’ birthday was one of the great joys of Fanie Buys’ childhood. For him, Christmas is a thing of fascination and adoration- the ritual of it, the domesticity, the theatre. This love for Christmas and its oddities has endured becoming the central focus of his most recent solo exhibition which features obscure Christmas scenes.

As with a particularly suspicious fruit cake, the artist has picked out and savoured his favourite ingredients of the holiday: dressing up, precocious children, failed gastronomy and underlying tension. Ultimately, Buys aims to rearrange the innocuousness of a secular family Christmas into something both off-putting and at the same time, alluring.