Painter and DJ · South Africa
Leon Botha
Leon Botha (1985–2011) was a South African painter and hip-hop DJ from Cape Town, known as DJ Solarize. Born with progeria, a rare genetic condition that causes rapid ageing, he became one of the longest-lived people with the disease, and made paintings, performances and a photographic collaboration that explored it. He appeared in Die Antwoord's video Enter the Ninja and died in 2011, a day after his 26th birthday.
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Leon Botha was born in Cape Town on 4 June 1985 with progeria, a condition that ages the body many times faster than normal; most children with it do not live beyond their early teens. He was diagnosed at about four, had heart bypass surgery in 2005, and lived to 26, longer than almost anyone else with the disease at the time. He was determined to live that time fully.
Art came first. He took classes at the Tygerberg Art Centre from his third year of primary school, left school after Grade 9 to concentrate on art, and became a full-time painter, working mostly in paint and taking commissions. His pictures had a dark undertone. He was also a hip-hop DJ under the name DJ Solarize, and hip-hop was the subject of his first solo exhibition, Liquid Sword; I Am HipHop, which opened in January 2007 at the Rust-en-Vrede gallery in Durbanville, near Cape Town. A second, Liquid Swords; Slices of Lemon, followed in March 2009.
In 2010 he and the photographer Gordon Clark made Who Am I?… Transgressions, a series of staged, theatrical portraits of Botha that asked questions about destiny and immortality. It was first shown in Cape Town, at the João Ferreira Gallery, and later in the Netherlands; his mother said the project helped him face the world as he had always wanted to. The same year he appeared in the music video for Die Antwoord's "Enter the Ninja", which brought him to a worldwide audience.
A stroke in 2010 weakened him, and he died on 5 June 2011, a day after his 26th birthday. His life went on to inspire an opera, Solarize, by the Polish composer Marcin Stańczyk, staged by Krzysztof Garbaczewski at the Polish National Opera in Warsaw in 2014. See our lists of South African artists and African painters.
