identity. He has been referred to consistently as the enfant terrible of the South African art sphere, possessing simultaneously a profound sensitivity to life and art, bordering on the poetic as well as a deep rooted commitment to the truth or pursuit thereof. It comes as no surprise that over the span of his career, he has offended, scandalized and landed in hot water more than once. The first major controversy and also the event that catapulted Barker into the public eye centred on the 1990 Standard Bank National Drawing Competition in which he had entered a highly unresolved and hurried work under the African name of Andrew Moletsi. As a result, the Moletsi work was shortlisted, where Barker's was not, highlighting the biased, racially motivated judging systems that controlled the selection process. The Famous International Gallery Barker's Famous International Gallery (FIG) was a turning point in the exhibition of South African contemporary art throughout its existence from 1989 to 1995. An artist-run space, the gallery was a space for younger artists at the time to exhibit their work. The gallery allowed artists to showcase work that most if not all commercial galleries at the time would not touch, creating a platform for political and social subversion in the South African art scene that would prove instrumental. Many of these artists eventually rose to prominence, including Kendell Geers, Minette Vari, Barend De Wet, and Stephen Cohen. Coke Adds life In 1993, a year after the end of the Mozambican Civil War, Barker created a large scale installation piece at the Everard Read Gallery in Johannesburg entitled Coke Adds Life. Taking its title from a series of television commercials advertising Coca-Cola, the words became something darker than implied by the familiar, cheerful jingle. The installation was inspired by a trip to Mozambique, in which Barker visited a hospital that seemed deserted. Instead of inundated doctors, Barker found, instead, several Coca-Cola vending machines."Walking around Mozambique and going around hospitals and seeing no doctors and seeing coke machines in this war torn country was for me a massive installation of Apartheid so the first installation I made was called Coke Adds Life. If you can get a coke machine in a hospital, can't you get a doctor?" Wayne Barker, 2002 Nothing Gets Lost in the Universe Nothing Gets Lost in the Universe was Barker's third solo show, shown at the F.I.G Gallery in