Archive: Issue No. 45, May 2001

Anthony Cawood has produced a collaged interior entitled Paperwall in the Greatmore Studios gallery. Cawood has taken part in a number of Thupelo workshops and last year held a show at the AVA.

Opening May 30 at 5.30pm
Closes June 13

Administered by João Ferreira Fine Art, the Smallest Gallery in Cape Town is little more than a vitrine tucked between a restaurant and a clothing shop on Greenmarket Square. This month the gallery plays host to ceramic works by Martine Jackson. Ferreira aims to showcase the work of a different young artist here each month.

Dr Charles Slater is a senior lecturer in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Faculty of Health Sciences, UCT. He produces medical imaging programs that allow complex anatomical information to be viewed. He has a strong interest in fine arts applications of his research and has previously worked in collaboration with artists. Dr Slater will present examples of his medical imagery and discuss his working methods, in a forum exploring visual media in a primarily non-fine arts context.

Wednesday May 16, 1-2pm

Robert Hodgins hardly needs any introduction to South African audiences. Eighty years of age, Hodgins is still fresh, energetic and productive enough to have received a FNB Vita Award nomination just last year. Of these new paintings and monotypes he says "I've wasted no part of my life. It is all there". Hodgins' work engages a diversity of emotion - the often sinister and serious themes contrast with the surface humour and vibrant colour, and all is rendered with notable virtuosity. Hodgins engages an audience in a fresh and challenging way, the work demanding a personal interpretation.

Opening: Friday, May 04, 6pm
Closing: June 26

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Born in 1957 in Cape Town, Tyrone Appollis studied art part-time at the Community Arts Project (under Cecil Skotnes) and at the Foundation School of Art in Observatory. He began exhibiting in 1982, both by himself and on group shows In. 1988 he was active in the formation of the Mitchell's Plain Art Group and in 1989, by invitation of the British Council, he traveled to England. He is known almost as well for his abilities as a poet and musician as he is for being a visual artist.

This, Appollis' ninth one-person show, is entitled 'No Apologies'. He describes his work as "� in one way or another, autobiographical. I portray an array of continuous movement, animating featureless townships with colourful shacks and folk on the streets, dancing, vending, making music and occasionally fighting." Appollis will be showing paintings, drawings and assemblages. Thematically his work is often a tribute to musicians whose music he greatly admires, but he also celebrates South African heroes and politicians, or events of historical significance in our country's chequered past. He considers political and social reconciliation to be a function of art, and also that life and art are inextricably linked, each reflecting the other in an ongoing quest for truth and beauty.

Dedicating much of his time to the upliftment of art in disadvantaged local communities, he has taught secondary school pupils. Appollis has received commissions on several occasions, including the recent production of a monument commemorating the death of children during the notorious Trojan Horse incident. A variety of publications and novels feature illustrations and paintings by Appollis, and his works are represented in numerous private, public and corporate art collections throughout South Africa and abroad.

Opening: Monday, May 07, 6pm
Closing: May 26

Graffiti artists Mantis, Falco and Makone, collectively known as TVA - The Villainous Animators, will rub shoulders with the art gallery establishment this month. Since its establishment in the late 80s by Falco Star, TVA has grown to become the most recognized graffiti crew in South Africa through relentless dedication and many litres of spraypaint. They have travelled nationally and internationally producing work for exhibitions, demonstrations, workshops and competitions. They are considered to have produced some of the largest legal and illegal works in all of SA's major cities. Along with the DJ, MC and B-Boys and Girls, graffiti artists, as part of Hip Hop culture, can lay claim to what is arguably the most pervasive art/ music movements of our time. It is this street culture which finds itself in the art gallery on May 12 and 13 when TVA will be in action there.

The artists will be in the gallery from 10.30am - 4pm on May 12 and 13.

Opening: Sunday, May 13, 6pm
Closing: May 30

This exhibition highlights work produced by high school students in Cape Town's Southern suburbs. The show has been curated by Rowan Smith (whose 'Boy' and 'Girl' are one of the highlights of 'Walking the Street' currently winding down in Observatory) and Brian Kilbey (who has apparently achieved local renown for producing events like 'Shimmer' and 'Apocalypse').

Opening: Wednesday, April 25, 6pm
Closing: July 31

Shelly Sacks grew up in South Africa and moved to London some time ago, where she continued to produce art. She is exhibiting what she terms a "social sculpture". This term was first used in the 1970s by Joseph Beuys, to describe an expanded conception of art in which thought, speech and discussion are core "materials". Given that social sculpture arises out of the perception of all human beings as artists, it requires us to shape a democratic, sustainable and free social order in tune with our creative potential and our right to develop and express this potential. Expanding our conception of art in this way lifts the aesthetic out of its confines to a specific sphere or media, relocating it in a collective, imaginative work-space in which we can see, re-thing and reshape our lives.

In this installation, Sacks deals with the threatened banana trade of the Windward Islands. The work is made from dried banana skins and the story is told by recorded testimonies of the island growers. The problems faced by small scale producers of bananas are brought to the fore. The GATT agreement on world trade stipulates exact and limiting specifications for bananas that are to be sold internationally. This effectively cuts out smaller scale producers and reduces the varieties available. Bananas are a politically charged commodity and their trade forms part of complex networks influenced by politics and drug trafficking. Those who unite against the unfair trade restrictions are often threatened with violence.

Shelley Sacks is Head of Art at Oxford Brookes University. She worked for many years with Joseph Beuys in Germany, and lectures widely on both Beuys' and her own social sculpture activities.

Opening: April 21
Closing: July 31

John Murray's second one person show is entitled 'Undercover'. On first glance his paintings and multi-media works seem cut from the same cloth as the Bitterkomix artists, and Murray does indeed hail from Stellenbosch. But, while his skillfully rendered work does bear these traces, it has more of a Pop edge and doesn't quite so relentlessly plumb the South African psyche. This is not to say that his work ignores social issues, but rather that his language is more complex. 'Undercover' suggests covert reconnaissance, and perhaps Murray's role as an artist is just that. Most of the work in the show is presented in a mosaic-like format with clusters of images which seem at first unrelated. On closer inspection subtle links and associations explore such themes as security, religion and rampant consumerism. The juxtaposition of diverse subject matter parallels the everyday bombardment of contradictory information and images to which South Africans are accustomed. Murray's last show, at the AVA, was almost a complete sell-out.

Opening: April 25, 6.30pm
Closing: May 26

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'Inferno and Paradiso' is an internationally acclaimed photographic exhibition curated by artist Alfredo Jaar. A Chilean born resident of New York, Jaar traveled to Rwanda in 1994 in the middle of the genocide, an experience which changed his life and his art and resulted in the staging of this exhibition.

The installation showcases work by 18 of the world's foremost photojournalists and addresses the emotional neutralisation that photography and other visual arts have suffered in our times. Each photographer was asked to choose two pictures of their own, the first representing the most difficult, painful picture they had taken, and the other being the one which had given them the most joy. The exhibition is extremely moving and its intention is to work against the general numbness and immunity that is built up by individuals through the constant bombardment of images expressing human suffering, by the press and other media. The exhibition deals with issues and images of human suffering and through them tries to reinstill a sense of compassion and caring that may have been lost to societies that have been exposed to high levels of violence. Its pertinence to the South African situation is easy to see, and it also includes works by prominent Southern African photographers Peter Magubane, Themba Hadebe and Ricardo Rangel.

Opening: Saturday, April 21, 11am

'The Hourglass Project - A woman's vision' is a collection of prints by women artists which was produced at the Caversham Press, run by Malcolm and Ros Christian in KwaZulu-Natal. The show consists of a portfolio of 30 prints by 15 artists from both South Africa and abroad. The exhibition is part-sponsored by the Netherlands Embassy and is documented in a catalogue which will be available.

Opening: April 10
Closing: extended until the end of May

Nigel Mullins began the millennium by being nominated for the Daimler Chrysler Award for contemporary South African Art 2000. Later in the year he won a merit prize at the ABSA Atelier 2000 The work to be exhibited here, entitled 'Hopeful Monsters', includes his award-winning series of oil paintings 'An Aesthetic for Cruelty and Violence'. Mullins is known for his oil paintings which, while skilfully crafted, are invested with a manic energy. His large single-figure 'Superhumans' from 1999 have, through a set of anarchic mutations, become the single heads which comprise his new work. These have retained the complex juxtaposition of abstract and literal elements of his previous work. 'An Aesthetic for Cruelty and Violence' is a formally composed set of 42 paintings, rigorously created and sumptuously coloured. Each smaller piece within the whole is the setting for an act or acts of violence, either blatant or inferred. From the jewel-like brilliance of early Western altarpieces to contemporary starkness, there is a rhythm and a beauty which cleverly and clearly sets up a paradox of aesthetic and violence.

This, his second one-person exhibition at the Hänel, will be followed by shows at the Royal Overseas League premises in London and Edinburgh, as well as exhibitions in Germany. He will also participate in "Art Fair 2001" in Frankfurt.

Opening: April 01
Closing: May 31

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For one day only, Sunday March 18, the last day of a Thupelo workshop being held at the South African National Gallery, the participants will have their work up in a work-in-progress exhibition. A cross section of Cape Town artists are involved, and visitors are invited to view the work and talk to the artists.

Opening: March 18, 10am - 2pm