MJ Lourens studied Fine Art, specialising in sculpture, at the University of Pretoria from 1992 to 1996. His body of work includes paintings, sculptures and film, having exhibited in several prominent galleries around South Africa.

Lourens has also directed and produced films such as DIE RIT/THE DRIVE (2009), PROGNOSE/PROGNOSIS (2008) and PA/FATHER (2006), which was screened at the Commonwealth Film Festival and was in the official selection of the African International Film Festival, Tariva, Spain. Such films can be viewed at www.prefab.co.za. Lourens lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

Lourens considers the traditional Landscape as an emotional terrain. In these contemporary paintings, the land often ceases to be topographical and becomes internal. The paintings hold a contradiction: the ultimate tenderness of being, against the mechanisms of human subsistence.