Diana Hyslop lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In her mid twenties she worked for Marvel Comics in London. On her return to South Africa Hyslop joined the film industry working on feature and documentary films. In the late eighties she studied painting at Bill Ainslie’s now legendary Johannesburg Art Foundation.

In the nineties she spent a year at the Santa Monica Fine Arts Studios in California before returning to Johannesburg where she spent time between filming, painting and studying art part time at UNISA (University of South Africa).

It was in 1998 that Hyslop committed to full time painting after having her first solo show at the AVA Gallery in Cape Town.

In 2002 she joined the Fordsburg Artists Studios (aka the Bag Factory Studios) as a permanent tenant artist and was part of this downtown collective till 2020.

Initially informed by comics and film, Hyslop’s work explores magical realism and a universe of possibilities in which unexpected combinations are viable, all co-exist, and where everything can happen at once. She is interested in the duality of existence, a solitary/social phenomenon though which an eminent encounter can sometimes determine our pathways. And go beyond it.

Residencies and Workshops

2015 ISAKA – Zambia
2013 CAMAC – France
2012 SIM – Reykjavik, Iceland
2011 CRUCES – Montevideo, Uruguay
2008 TULIPAMWE – Nambia
2006 KUONA – Lamu, Kenya
2001 THAPONG – Gaborone, Botswana
2000 TUPELO INTERNATIONAL – Malmesbury, Western Cape
1993 SANTA MONICA STUDIOS – L.A. California

My work explores the mystifying paradox between the poetic and the prosaic that many of us encounter in everyday life. Magic realism in my painting allows me to take ideas out of the ordinary and imbue them with a more transcendent meaning.

I am interested in taking people out of their expected contexts, so that they no longer inhabit the obvious social documentary realm, but rather seem to float in the half rooted, half etheric world of dreaming. Devoid of their predictable environments, characters often become emblematic of other states and feeling, rather than purely representation records of the seen and known.

I use a lot of animal images in my work because they evoke a natural empathy so that different experiences can be illuminated in a more creative way.