Victor Gordon


Victor Gordon is a visual artist born in South Africa. Gordon is primarily a painter and sculptor. He also creates installations assemblages, collages, drawings and photographs.

About the Artist

Gordon was born during the Apartheid era in South Africa. He grew up in Alberton, a satellite township near Johannesburg before his family relocated to Hillbrow. He attended the whites-only Germiston High School and then Parktown Boys High School. He was arrested at age fifteen when he attacked a white Policeman for setting his dog on a black man in Hillbrow. This resulted in his incarceration and appearance in Juvenile court, where he was convicted of assault. He was conscripted into the South African Air Force Gymnasium Valhalla 1971–1972. After spending some time in London and continental Europe, he returned to Johannesburg where he co-founded a commune at 30 Wellington Road in Parktown. In 1975 he moved to Cape Town, returning to Johannesburg in 1977 to study Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was taught by artists Judith Mason, Robert Hodgins, Giuseppe Cattaneo and Paul Stopforth. After University he stood unsuccessfully for the Progressive Party in the 1982 election to the Johannesburg Metropolitan City Council in the Vrededorp/Mayfair Ward.
By that time he was a supporter of the struggle against Apartheid. Privately he continued making resistance art. Gordon was employed by University of Witwatersrand Students Representative Council 1982–1987 as Head of Student Administration. He managed the University SRC Administration from 1982 to 1987 in a highly politicized capacity as an administrative ombudsman, ameliorating the effects of South African Police and the SAP Security Branch intimidation, violence and oppression on WITS students. During the second declared South African State of Emergency in 1985/6 he was used, among other things, as the messenger between the senior university administration and their legal representation to deliver documents by hand to Brigadier Jan Coetzee, the head of police at Protea Police Station in Soweto, on behalf of the many dozens of detained students. This was when the whole of Soweto and thirty-five Townships countrywide were occupied by white SA security forces.
In 1987, due to be recalled for a second tour of duty in the SA defence force, he left South Africa to formalize his anti-Apartheid art with further study and subsequently to live in Australia. He undertook a research Master's degree at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney from 1988–1990. His graduate exhibition was titled Behold the Lands where Satan Reigns held at the Waterside Workers Federation Hall in Sussex street Sydney in June and July 1990.
Gordon has two children, Sarah and Hannah, and lives in Orange, NSW, Australia.

Teaching career

Gordon taught part-time at Sydney College of The Arts – University of Sydney 1989–1993, at University of Western Sydney and at various Metropolitan TAFE colleges. In 1999 he relocated to Broken Hill, New South Wales, where he ran the Western Institute of TAFE Art School until 1993 when he transferred to WIT's Orange Campus, New South Wales, to head the bigger Art, Design and Music School until the New South Wales Government funding for arts’ courses ceased in 2013.

Art Prize Participation

1992— Finalist, Portrait Bruce Haigh
Blake Prize 1996— Finalist
Sulman Prize in 2007— Finalist, Portrait of Mike Parr —

Art in Public Collections