Brett Seiler: Men, bitumen and the art of hustling

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Hustle is an underrated virtue of artistic success, as indispensable as talent. When it comes to chutzpah in service of being noticed, Cape Town painter Brett Seiler has shown oodles of tenacity.

Over the past decade, this whimsically tattooed artist with a shock of ginger hair has hustled his text and figure paintings made with roof paint and bitumen into shows in all the right galleries. As much as the hustle has been about getting himself seen, Seiler remains fiercely loyal to his community.

He has consistently collaborated on pop-up exhibitions featuring his work and that of other scenesters. Last year, together with artists Luca Evans, Mitchell Gilbert Messina and Guy Simpson, he co-founded Under Projects. This plucky artist-run venue on Roeland Street has quickly emerged as a vital space for leftfield artists and projects.

All this enterprise has started to generate Seiler wider notice. Fans of his queer-positive paintings depicting lithe-bodied gay men, some in domestic habitats, now extend far beyond the Limpopo River. 

This waterway separating South Africa and Zimbabwe is an important landmark in Seiler’s early biography and émigré status.

Seiler is currently exhibiting in Berlin. His exhibition, Riding In Cars With Boys, which opened to a crush of visitors earlier this month at dealership Eigen + Art, has further extended his fan base. Collectors from the United States, China, England, Germany and Taiwan acquired his work.

Seiler’s journey from City Bowl hipster in a dress to bright boy of the zeitgeist owes a great deal to his decision to commit himself to painting. Arguably, leaving Zimbabwe was as consequential.

Last year, as he prepared for exhibitions in Johannesburg and Berlin, I made a number of visits to Seiler’s ragged studio in Salt River. On one occasion, I watched as he added roof paint to a large, two-part painting depicting three men in a room with parquet flooring, houseplants and bunting. 

Brett Seiler’s ‘Reading list, 2019’ rendered
using pine, canvas, Belgian linen, roof paint and bitumen

The painting later became the centrepiece of his arresting solo exhibition, scenes from an apartment, at Everard Read in Johannesburg.

Seiler’s hustle resides in his use of poor materials — mainly roof paint and bitumen — that he gets from hardware stores. Bitumen, a black, petroleum-based medium conventionally used in waterproofing, lends his tart yet affecting output a striking monochrome palette. And yet, austere he isn’t.

Seiler’s casual yet emotionally resonant graphic style of rendering male figures — either head on or in tangled groups, sulking, embracing, kissing and loving — recalls the intimacy of American photographer Peter Hujar’s bedroom portraits.

Locally, though, Seiler’s admirers frequently liken him to the English painter David Hockney.

Placing Seiler’s work in the canon of gay artists is important, but so too is appreciating his tough journey to becoming a painter. Seiler is open and candid about the role of his upbringing in Zimbabwe.

“I had a very liberal family,” says Seiler. “My parents had no issue with me being gay. I think the issues came from the outside world.”

In 1994, the year he was born in Harare, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation forbade any programming related to homosexuality. Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe upped the stakes a year later when he rejected homosexuality as a human right during a keynote at a literary festival. Mugabe infamously used this speech to describe gay rights activists as “sodomists and sexual perverts”.

Seiler, though, had other complications to deal with while growing up. His father, Wayne, was a horticulturist employed on various farms to manage the growing of roses for export to Europe. Seiler’s settled rural life was upended by Zimbabwe’s state-sanctioned farm seizures in the year 2000. The family moved to Harare, where Seiler’s father scrambled for work. The artist recalls this time as a fever dream.

Brett Seiler’s ‘After Simon, 2019’.

Seiler was 12 when, in 2006, Zimbabwe codified its criminal laws, explicitly criminalising same-sex sexual activity among men in legislation updating its colonial-era common law prohibitions against homosexuality.

In 2008, Seiler’s father unexpectedly died, at the age of 38, from a heart attack. It visited new hardships on the artist.

An angsty teenager who was ostracised at school, Seiler was expelled for his promiscuous behaviour in the bathroom. He sought refuge online. Seiler was a prolific user of the instant messaging app Mxit, which he used to connect with gay men in South Africa.

He hooked up with a man in Johannesburg. An offer of a ticket and place to stay followed. Seiler spent nearly a year in Johannesburg jobbing as a stylist for his older lover. It was, he says, an unstable relationship. He returned to Harare to complete his schooling.

Seiler learnt about Ruth Prowse School of Art in Cape Town through a friend. He applied to study graphic design, a career path suggested by his mother, was accepted, and made the 2 500km journey to Cape Town by bus.

Seiler spent his first year lodging with his grandfather’s stepbrother in Muizenberg.

His digs neighboured on a halfway house; its denizens were frequent visitors. He took the train to art school. None of this was ideal but it was character building. A young Zimbabwean émigré with short-cropped hair and a taste for indie boy outfits was learning to hustle.

Seiler had no clear intention to be a painter when he entered art school. His earliest expression took the form of photographs. Some of Seiler’s youthful work still lives online. Seiler maintained a Tumblr page from 2012 until 2018, a period in which he transformed from photographer to painter.

Seiler’s early photography reveals a set of aesthetic preoccupations about the self and its narration to the world that endures in his paintings. In less highfalutin language, his early photos hint at the effect of selfie culture on an increasingly tattooed youth.

Like his paintings, Seiler’s tattoos are rendered without colour.

“They are kind of little drawings or notes,” says Seiler, who has the words “The Lovers” tattooed on his throat. “I have a lot of exes on my body. I have done some myself.”

Seiler got his first tattoo when he was teenager. A tattooist in the border town of Musina inked his father’s name on his back.

“When I was first having sex with men, they would ask who Wayne is. I was too embarrassed to say it was my dad. I told them it’s my dead dog.”

This biographical detail is alluded to in a 2019 painting titled Lovers (Writings On Your Back), which depicts two naked male figures pre-coitus. 

Seiler has frequently referenced his father in his work, for instance listing him as among the things he missed in an eccentrically framed text painting shown at SMAC Gallery in 2019. In another text painting from 2019, he scrawled the words “A portrait of a lonely gay man on Fathers Day” in loud uppercase.

Text is an important component of Seiler’s painting output. His Berlin exhibition includes a majestic display of his on-going Alphabutt series. Each canvas lists words linked to a particular letter of the alphabet. For example, F is for faggot, feminism and Freddie Mercury. A is for Aids, ass, anal and Andy Warhol.

Warhol’s presence is apt. “He is a hustler,” quipped the wigged one in 1975. “So what. We’re hustlers, too.”

Seiler arrived at his naïve painting style indirectly. He credits Kelly Maroon and Lynette Bester, his teachers at Ruth Prowse, with introducing him to conceptual art, which favoured words over images, ideas as much as icons.

For his graduate exhibition in 2015 Seiler produced a sculptural installation featuring two crossed flagpoles, each with a monochromatic replica of the Zimbabwean flag.

He also transcribed clauses relating to the legal status of homosexuality in the 54 countries of Africa on an A2 sheet of paper.

“The simplicity and elegance of these two ideas and images hit me like a ton of bricks,” says Charles Shields, group chief executive of Everard Read. 

“I bought them from Brett because I admired the deft sleight of hand in both that eroded the implicit authority of the underlying institutions. I loved the idea that, almost in the manner of a citizen’s arrest, an individual could strip a country of its colours.  Similarly the messy, hesitant yet accusatory scrawl transcribing the often offending [homosexuality] laws seemed to set up a David-and-Goliath-like tension.”

Shields later donated these two works to Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa.

When he graduated Seiler thought of himself as a conceptual artist in the mould of Cuban-born American artist Félix González-Torres. His early output frequently referenced González-Torres.

“He was the first contemporary artist I came across that made art about queer love using everyday materials,” remarked Seiler in a 2017 interview. “His work was also profoundly political, which has impacted me and how I perceive  political work.”

Seiler pivoted to painting after his 2017 debut solo exhibition, Macho Man, Tell It to My Heart, which included another flagpole installation. 

He promptly retired smart-alecky A plus B conceptual gestures in favour of simple, flatly rendered paintings featuring either text or a defined male protagonist.

One memorable work from 2019 combined both elements. “A homosexual with bad teeth,” read a caption floated over a generic portrait of a young man. As with many of Seiler’s earlier paintings, this work was presented in a low-rent pine frame made by the artist.

“Those frames were very shabby and unapologetic,” says Seiler. “I don’t think they lie in that way.”

This statement is true of Seiler too, and accounts for what endeared him to curator and writer Khanya Mashabela. Seiler and Mashabela befriended each other online, long before Seiler’s renovation as a painter.

“I’m attracted to Brett’s work because of its sincerity and lack of preciousness,” says Mashabela. “He has always used cheap materials even before he started using bitumen, largely out of necessity but also because it allows him the freedom to work fast and loose. 

“He’s able to mash personal histories with references to queer activism and literature without being pretentious, and to be funny without being sarcastic.”

These traits also define Seiler’s enthusiastic way of being in the world.

“I am impatient,” Seiler told me one day last year about his approach to painting. “A lot of the time I want to finish something, which is why I use bitumen — it enables me to work fast.”

The larger scale of his new paintings has not inhibited Seiler’s need for speed.

“I find it easier to work at scale because there is so much room. At a larger scale I can add more things and the story unfolds better.”

Seiler’s growing confidence as a painter unafraid to reach into his personal life for inspiration is fundamental to this unfolding story. It is a storyline characterised by growing applause and expanding horizons.

Brett Seiler’s exhibition Riding in Cars with Boys is on at Galerie Eigen + Art and 4 x 4, featuring Githan Coopoo, Asemahle Ntlonti, Natalie Paneng and Guy Simpson, is at Eigen + Art Lab, also in Berlin, Germany, both until 25 February.

Eigen + Art, which has represented Brett Seiler since 2021, is showing four South African artists — Githan Coopoo, Asemahle Ntlonti, Natalie Paneng and Guy Simpson — in another of their Berlin spaces. So what’s the appeal?

“As a gallery that was founded in the former [German Democratic Republic] and spent many years in places of upheaval with temporary exhibition spaces, we now want to be right there, in places where political or economic difficulties had to be overcome,” says Gerd Harry Lybke, who founded Eigen + Art in Leipzig in 1983.

Lybke’s enthusiasm for new South African art has matured over time. Two years ago, he tapped curator Khanya Mashabela to organise a group exhibition in Leipzig.

“There is a lack of exhibition opportunities for emerging artists in SA, so it has been rewarding to see artists who I have seen working hard for a long time get some validation from a gallery that is professional and genuinely interested in their practice,” says Mashabela.

She praises the gallery’s willingness to understand and engage with artists in experimental ways. Under Projects, which is co-run by Seiler, grew out of a short-lived gallery project on Buitenkant Street sponsored by Eigen + Art. 

“It separates them from the international galleries who approach the region as a market trend.”