Artist Profile 002: Robert Hodgins
La Contessa Venemosa is the engaging title of the second print in the Editions for ArtThrob series. This new lithograph in three colours is from Robert Hodgins, the acclaimed painter whose retrospective catalogue was launched recently, and whose work hangs in virtually every major art institution in the country. "Very few artists", writes Kendell Geers in a catalogue essay, "command the respect and admiration of their peers in the way Robert Hodgins does, a reverence often verging on cult status. In South Africa, he is the quintessential artist's artist, a guru for four generations, a point of reference for every self-respecting curator, and a voice of reason in an age where video has all but killed the painting star".
Born in 1920 in London, UK, Hodgins finally settled in South Africa in 1953, and has been painting ever since, exhibiting regularly through the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. His witty and satirical paintings of businessmen, generals, fops, blowsy women, Ubu and a host of other characters are an integral part of South Africa's art patrimony. "For me", says Hodgins, "it is very simple. The act of painting at a particular moment is able, for reasons I neither understand nor even try to understand, to open up the whole world of my experience, my thinking, my aspirations".
La Contessa Venemosa is in an original lithograph in red, pink and black handprinted on BFK Rives by master printer Mark Attwood of the Artists Press, Johannesburg, signed in pencil by the artist, and embossed in the margin with the chops of the Artists Press and Editions for ArtThrob.
The print can be viewed at the Joao Ferreira Gallery in Cape Town, and at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg.
La Contessa Venemosa, 2002. Lithograph. Paper size 57 x 76cm. Image size 49.5 x 68cm. Edition/60. Signed and numbered.
Price: R3000 / $450 / Euro 450
Artist Profile 001: Zwelethu Mthethwa
The photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa has garnered a lot of attention for his considered portraits of the living conditions and experiences of the migrants who end up in our country's townships and informal settlements. As ArtThrob's Paul Edmunds has observed, "both the cultural disorientation they experience and their quotidian existence is rendered in the saturated hues and rich textures of his large-format photographs."
Zwelethu began exhibiting in the mid 1980s and has partaken in many one-person and group shows. These include 'The Short Century', which travelled Europe and the US recently, and the last two Dakar Biennales. Born in Durban in 1960, Zwelethu has a Diploma and an Advanced Diploma in Fine Art from Michaelis. Formerly a lecturer in Photography and Drawing at that venerable institution, he resigned in 1999 due to his increasingly high international profile. ArtThrob is honoured to launch Editions for Artthrob with a print from this dynamic talent.
Untitled, 2002. Lambda print. 61cm x 45cm. Edition/60. Signed and numbered certificate.
Price: R4000 / $450 / Euro 450
