South African printmakers

Printmaking has played an outsized role in South African art. Prints are cheap to make and easy to circulate, and under apartheid they suited artists with few resources and a great deal to say. From the 1960s the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Rorke's Drift, in KwaZulu-Natal, trained Black artists in linocut and woodcut; its students, including the Namibian John Muafangejo, made some of the most important prints of the era. Posters and prints were also weapons of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s.

Today William Kentridge is among the world's most admired printmakers, with etchings, linocuts and lithographs that run alongside his films. Diane Victor's drawings and prints, including portraits made with candle smoke, Sue Williamson's work on memory and history, and Norman Catherine's dark, playful imagery belong to a strong tradition. These are the country's printmakers, most looked-up first. See also South African artists.