Theresa-Anne Mackintosh (b. 1968, Pretoria, RSA) is a South African multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, animation, and digital media. She received her MA (Fine Arts) degree from the University of Pretoria in 1995, where she majored in painting. Emerging in Gauteng in the early 1990s, Mackintosh developed her practice during a period of significant social and artistic transformation, at a time when painting’s relevance as a critical medium was widely contested.
Despite working fluidly across media, Mackintosh has remained committed to painting as the nucleus of her practice, approaching it as both a material and metaphysical endeavour. As articulated by writer Sean O’Toole, painting functions in her work as “a process, a faith,” through which she engages both the tangible and the transcendent. Her practice is grounded in an intuitive, process-driven methodology that privileges gesture, line, and surface as sites of psychological and emotional inscription.
At first encounter, Mackintosh’s paintings often present a deceptively accessible graphic language that is unsettled by subtle disruptions of form and spatial logic. This productive tension, described by O’Toole as a push and pull between familiarity and disquiet, lies at the core of her practice and offers insight into the precarious nature of human subjectivity. Her work records painterly gesture in a vulnerable and pared-back manner, allowing process to remain visible within the final image.
The human figure has remained central throughout Mackintosh’s career, appearing in abstracted and archetypal forms that oscillate between vulnerability and resilience. Her visual language combines scrawled gestures, reduced forms, and vivid bodily colour with moments of restraint and silence. These figures often suggest hearts, eyes, mouths, or bodily embraces, foregrounding themes of touch, intimacy, relationship, and the unstable construction of the self. Across her bodies of work, Mackintosh engages with the dismantling and reconfiguration of identity, allowing traces of experience to remain visible on the painted surface.
Mackintosh’s cross-disciplinary practice has enabled her to translate humanist iconography across two- and three-dimensional forms, producing what she has described, and as discussed by O’Toole, as a “menagerie” of fictional bodies. Her sculptural and animated works extend the concerns of her painting practice, exploring how form, personality, and affect can be reimagined through different material and temporal registers. Central to this approach is an emphasis on process as a mode of discovery, where repetition, erasure, and rebuilding allow meaning to emerge gradually rather than through fixed narrative.
Mackintosh has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally. Selected solo exhibitions include Jackie the Kid at KZNSA Gallery in Durban, If You Say So at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg, I Can Hear a Lull at Kalashnikovv Gallery in Johannesburg, and Menagerie and The Young Ones at Gallery MOMO in Johannesburg. She completed a three-month residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre in the Netherlands in 2008 and has participated in major South African art fairs, including the Johannesburg Art Fair, Turbine Art Fair, and Cape Town Art Fair.
