Dr Lola Frost is an artist and a scholar who lives in London and Cape Town. She was born in Bloemfontein and educated at the University of Stellenbosch (BA Graphic Art) and Rhodes University (MFA). Between1982 and 2001, in solo and group shows in Stellenbosch, Grahamstown, Durban and Johannesburg she exhibited her paintings which were acquired for the art collections of the Universities of Stellenbosch, Rhodes University and the Durban University of Technology, as well as of private collectors, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Durban Art Gallery, Tatham Art Gallery and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum. As a lecturer/senior lecturer in art history and art theory in the Art Department, Technikon Natal, Durban from 1990 to 2001, she contributed to South African visual art culture in reviews, exhibitions, conference papers and symposia.
After moving to the UK in 2001, she was awarded a joint Theory/Practice PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2007 on the topic of Negativity in Painting. She was the Leverhulme artist-in-residence in War Studies King’s College London in 2014/15. Her solo exhibitions – Pulse at Keynes College Gallery, University of Kent 2001, Coming Alive at The Clerkenwell Gallery 2013, Taking Risks 2014 and Going South 2015 at Somerset House, King’s College London, A Dilating Gaze at the London School of Economics 2016, Living the Fold at The Edward Street Gallery, University of Brighton 2017; and Towards Deep and Radiant Time at The Arcade, King’s College London 2018, offered audiences a lifeworld beyond power.
As a Visiting Fellow in War Studies, King’s College London, from 2016 to 2026, and a Visiting Fellow at The Centre for Law, Art and Humanities at ANU Canberra in 2019, in presentations, collaborations, conference papers and published articles she has explored the interface between art and war; art and compassion; the politics and ethics of aesthetic risk; and how the de-territorialising ethics of Aboriginal Dream-Painting intersect with the power/knowledge interests of representational democracy. More recently she has done research on the topic of art and hidden violence against women in South Africa and published an article in the ‘After Rights’ special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights 2024 on how the work of art does its pluralising and constitutive work beside and beyond rights.
