Trevor Goss was an experimental contemporary artist in painting and sculpture who graduated with distinction from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at Cape Town and studied at the post- graduate level at the Hornsey School of Art in London. His work is in collections worldwide.
In 1979, out of concern for the well-being of his family and pained by what was happening in his country—symbolized by the injustices represented by Robin Island, which was in view of his studio, where the great Nelson Mandela was then incarcerated—Trevor Goss left South Africa and did not return again until he visited for a month in 2010. In the intervening years, Goss established himself in the United States where he exhibited nationally, including Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Chicago, Palm Springs and, finally, in Palm Desert where he opened a gallery on El Paseo in the year before his death.
During his earlier time in Cape Town and London, Trevor Goss had also painted murals and created installations for the theatre, for nightclubs, and for establishments such as Mary Quant’s store on Carnaby Street. Later, starting in 1996, employing his own unique applications of light-refractive, color-changing holographic material, a technique he perfected during his time in London, Goss established a business where he produced large scale installations for the entertainment industry. It was also in this perfecting of his holographic technique that Trevor Goss gained the attention of artist Kenneth Noland who visited Goss’ Santa Barbara studio to observe his process. In 1996 and again in 1998, Kenneth Noland commissioned a series of canvases from Trevor Goss to which Goss applied his unique light-refractive, color-changing holographic treatments.
The entertainment design projects to which Trevor Goss contributed his talents included the AT&T Pavilion at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta where he not only created a thirty-foot refractive color-changing mural, which he produced on site over the course of six weeks, but also two enormous flame cups he finished with his signature material that marked the pavilion’s grand entrance. And, at the opening ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, it was a stage of “ice,” designed by the renowned Jeremy Railton and rendered in Trevor Goss’ unique light-refractive and color-changing holographic material, on which Savion Glover danced. Railton, Founder and Chairman of the Entertainment Design Corporation, was also the award-winning designer behind the AT&T Pavilion.