Didata unveils impressive new corporate collection
by Sean O'Toole
It is an audacious and bold statement. The new Dimension Data corporate collection, inaugurated at a private function recently in Johannesburg, is exclusively constituted of abstract works. The impressive body that makes up this collection was pieced together by collection curator Michael Stevenson, and spans the entire post-war period until the present.
Speaking at the opening function, Stevenson remarked on the "fraught" nature of corporate collections. It was his personal decision to focus the collection around a central theme. "The decision was eventually made to collect post-war South African art that reflects the ongoing interest of artists in the aesthetic of abstraction," he elaborates in the impressive hardcover catalogue that explicates the collection.
Artists represented in the collection include Bettie Cilliers-Barnard, Gladys Mgudlandlu and Walter Battiss, of the older generation, and Paul Edmunds, Sandile Zulu and Moshekwa Langa from the current crop of contemporary practitioners. Langa is represented by two prints, Commercial jet airliner I & II (1998), beautifully rendered depictions of a Rome sky. Peter Eastman's Shark diptych is one of many delightful surprises on view in the collection.
Commenting on the range of the collection in the catalogue, Stevenson writes: "Unfortunately the work of certain artists who have an important place in the history of abstraction in South Africa (for instance Selby Mvusi, Kevin Atkinson, David Koloane amongst many other) is conspicuously absent, only because their works have not been available on the art market recently."
Marilyn Martin delivered a short opening speech, in which she praised the impetus of the collection. She linked its significance to the recent resurgence of public interest in painting, as evidenced at this year's Venice Biennale. She also reiterated a long-standing plea (first articulated in 1990) that "abstract art in South Africa requires writers and curators to support it, to question and to explain it".
The collection is housed at Dimension Data's new headquarters in Bryanston, at 57 Sloane Street. Further enquiries regarding the collection catalogue, Moving in time and space: shifts between abstraction and representation in post-war South Africa art should be directed to the Michael Stevenson Contemporary gallery.
