Dion Cupido

Biography

Dion Cupido was born in the large township of Mitchells Plain, South Africa. Cupido is a largely, self-taught artist. His early days consisted of experimenting with graffiti on the walls of the Cape Flats. Now a revered and respected artist, Dion has mastered his craft in the studio.

In 1990, upon helping a fellow classmate with a school project, he found that he really enjoyed the process and fell in love with art.

He then went on to do his first exhibition in 1998 and by 2003 he had joined the Arts & Media Centre’s professional development program, where he earned the Truworths AMAC Academy of the Visual Arts Award.

By 2013, Dion was nominated as a Bright Young thing in ArtSouthAfrica, South Africa’s most influential and widely read art magazine. Today we see that Cupido’s studio-produced paintings are still profoundly influenced by street art. He was first fascinated with the abstract and has cultivated his own unique style and technique over the years.

He also began to realise something special about his work; “I realised that our biased memories do more than simply present us with images of our personal history. It also shapes our sense of who and what we are. In doing so, it guides us to form an opinion about ourselves that may not be exactly accurate. As a result, it does little more than helping us experience life only as we THINK we know it,” says Cupido.

His work is now mostly a combination of portrait and abstraction, taking his fascination with street art techniques to explore identity and recollections of the past. Ashraf Jamal, a historian, and writer detected that Cupido “represents the very newly minted post-transitional moment in SA art; a moment in which our dark history and its democratic afterglow are both beside the point.”

Cupido currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

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