About Studio G

The man and the work

Across everything I make I work as G. The man behind the letter is on one page, at artist-g.global/about/. The rest of this page is the same text, because the house and the man are one studio.

I was born in 1980 in Stellenbosch, in the Cape Winelands. A place built on contrasts. Rugged mountain and soft vineyard. Enduring stone and shifting season. That landscape taught me something before I had words for it — that beauty usually holds tension, and that nothing permanent is ever really at rest.

Between thirteen and sixteen I had cancer. Aggressive. Far advanced. The body became a project managed by specialists, and the world I had assumed permanent stopped being permanent. I came out of that with a lens I could not put down — strength that carries tenderness, beauty that holds risk, the truest things arriving under pressure. I call it the dichotomies of life. I did not get answers from it. I got attention.

Everything I have made since comes out of that attention.

The Bronze

I am a figurative sculptor. The human body is my subject — it is the most honest record we have of what a life does to a person.

I begin where the themes begin. In the natural world. A weathered rock. The grain of wood. The tension of organic movement. From there I build in clay, cast in bronze by the traditional lost-wax method, and finish the surface with restraint. The material is allowed to speak plainly. It is not asked to perform.

Each piece is released as a fixed edition and never expanded. Every cast is recorded in a studio registry, issued with a Certificate of Authenticity, and given a unique work identifier. I would rather make a small body of work I can stand behind than a large one I cannot.

The Writing — The 420 Code

For thirty years, alongside the sculpture, I have been thinking and trying to write.

I have tried to put my thoughts into words many times – never quite getting it right. Luckily, with all those failures, came lessons – lessons that taught me at least what does not work. In 2025 the gears eventually clicked in place, and I was able to start writing down what I want to say.

The result is The 420 Code. A body of work that derives an ethic — what I ought to do — from physics — what is.

The physics — what is — says the awareness in me is the awareness in you.

The ethic — what I ought to do — says: Don’t be a cunt. Be kind.

Starting with one line – one record exists. One measured input. Zero free parameters. Every condition under which it could fail, listed in the open. Published copyleft. Free, forever.

The simplest honest thing I can say about it is this. The 420 Code is my life, written down. Not handed to me from above. Not a doctrine I am asking you to accept. It is just me, working from first principles in the open, showing my working and listing every way I could be wrong.

The sculpture is that same enquiry, worked in metal. The Code is it worked in language.

Why “G”

I sign the work G. Small. Deliberate. No surname carrying authority.

I am not a guru and I am not an authority. I do not want to be read as one. The whole point of the Code is that you check the structure yourself — you do not take my word for anything. A name on a pedestal works against that.

The man is here, once, on this page. Everywhere else, the work stands on its own. As G.

Antichristos — Architecture A and Architecture B

Christos is Greek for the anointed one. Anti means against, and it also means in place of. Antichristos is not against the man who stood on a hillside and said love your neighbour, do not judge, be kind. It is against the anointing. It takes the teaching, and puts it in place of the machine that was built around it.

There are two ways to run a world. I call them Architecture A and Architecture B.

Architecture A runs on authority. Something is true because someone anointed said so — a prophet, a priest, a king, a party, a book, a tradition, a history. It asks for loyalty before it asks for evidence. And it can never close the door on its own worst reading. The words do not fix how they are read, and the authority can only vouch for itself. So the blade is always within reach. That is how kind teachings end in crusades.

I love people. I cannot stand the institutions and the bullshit authority they built and keep alive. And most of all I cannot stand righteousness. Righteousness is the feeling of being right, turned into who you are — and into being better than someone else. It is a licence to be cruel. The world uses that licence every day.

Architecture B runs on structure. Nature and logic are the only authorities, because they are the only ones that bind everyone the same way. For something to be an authority, it must be universally true. Nothing else qualifies. Not gurus. Not messiahs. Not religions. Not me. That is why The 420 Code shows its working and lists every way it could be wrong. You do not have to trust me. You can check.

I am proposing Architecture B. Architecture B is Antichristos: the teaching kept, the anointing gone. And it carries its own master kill switch. If Architecture B ever sorts people the way Architecture A does — into saved and damned, in and out, better and worse — in any domain where it is tested, the argument fails. I hold myself to that too.

Antichristos is free to read at the420code.org.

The Lifestyle — 1980-08-05 – 2025-12-25

At the foot of every page of The 420 Code there is a line: the lifestyle 1980-08-05 – 2025-12-25.

It reads like a lifespan. It is one. It is the performance artist in me.

I always knew I would publish on the twenty-fifth of December. The target was 2025-12-25, and that date gave me what I needed.

It gave me a day. A day held sacred, in one form or another, for thousands of years. On it I gave my gift: The 420 Code, free, forever, to every I Am that is alive and every one still to come. And I chose it on purpose. It was dynamite laid at the foundation of Architecture A’s strongest form — religion. Not at people. At the idea that truth needs an anointed voice. For at least twenty-five years my purpose has been one thing: to end external authority by making it logically irrelevant. Like a candle in Times Square at midnight. There was a time a candle was the light against the dark. Today it is irrelevant.

It gave me a name. I want to do a few basic things. Dab rosin, make art, talk kak and philosophise. That is my life. That is my code. 420 also happens to be the name of the cannabis lifestyle — what I call the Be Kind lifestyle. The universe winked, and told me to look closer.

So I looked. From 5 August 1980 to 25 December 2025 is forty-five years. And the square root of 2025 is 45. That was the wink I needed. From that point everything was set: the birth of The 420 Code, and the end of the old me.

And it kept a promise. The 420 Code was written to keep a promise to my brother, Bouwer van Niekerk, who was murdered. It is for every mother, father, sister and brother who has lost someone to senseless cruelty and righteousness.

For every I Am still to come

I am a man who knows — not believes — that the awareness in me is the same awareness in you. I know that sounds ridiculous from a guy who wrote 604 kill switches to show exactly where he could be wrong. But that is just how it is — one of those dichotomies of life.

For me it is simple. We are all made of the same electron — identical copies of it, everywhere. Not one electron in the whole universe — one awareness, shared by all of them. And every electron is aware, in the only sense I mean it: it reads information, and it reacts to it. So the I Am in me is the I Am in you — the same I Am in every self-conscious being.

I Am is here now. I Am has been here before. And every day, more I Ams are being born. This I Am — me, this one aware configuration — is only one of the places it is happening now, and it will come to an end. Other I Ams will follow. The electrons will be configured again. I Am will be back.

So I am doing this for every I Am still to be born — including me, and especially the future versions of I Am. With the hope, and the dream, of a kinder, less cruel, more honest world when I Am arrives again.

That is why I do anything. For everyone. And for myself.

And that is why The 420 Code is free, forever. I am not going to charge I Am for anything. The idea is absurd to me.

One last thing

If there is a single line underneath all of this — the bronze and the writing both — it is this.

We are all one. The I in me is the I in you.

And if that is too gentle for where you are tonight, then this.

Don’t be a cunt. Be kind.