Current Review(s)
Wind Blowing on the Cape Flats
Peter Clarke at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts)‘About time’ reads the subtitle of a torn fragment in Peter Clarke’s mixed-media collage The Contributors (1986). Upon closer inspection, it turns out to be an unassuming invitation to an art exhibition to be opened by the artist. Another fragment announces David Goldblatt as the guest speaker for an exhibition of ‘Black South African Photographers’. These and other revealing scraps – like the ochre and burnt umbers of rock art forms - which seem to emerge from within the rusty hues of the painted wall to which they are pasted – are overlaid with a roll-call of names: Mancoba, Legae, Mbatha, Sedumedi, Mgudlandlu, Cole…
Many of these names, perhaps barely recognised by most in 1986, have become more prominent in the last two decades, as a result of individual and institutional efforts to re-evaluate and redress South Africa’s exclusionary canon. From the landmark exhibition ‘The Neglected Tradition’ at JAG (1988-9) to IZIKO’s recent attention to the legacy of the Community Arts Project (CAP), much progress has been made, though many of the names on Clarke’s register remain largely forgotten or unknown.
‘About time’ is also the tenor of the Clarke retrospective, ‘Wind Blowing on the Cape Flats’, at London’s Institute for International Visual Arts. Speaking at the press event, the 83-year-old artist nods his head in agreement: ‘It’s been a long time coming! ’ But if due recognition has been belated for Clarke, whose career spans six decades of painting, printmaking and poetry, it has recently arrived by the bucketful. In 2005, Clarke was awarded the President’s Order of Ikhamanga, in 2010 the Arts and Culture Lifetime Achievement award. From 2005 to 2008, Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin worked on the landmark scholarly text Listening to Distant Thunder: The Art of Peter Clarke, which would inform both the artist’s first solo exhibition in South Africa at the Standard Bank Gallery, and the SANG retrospective in 2011.
16 January 2013 - 19 March 2013
Student Review: Just Paper and Glue
Peter Clarke at STEVENSON in Cape TownThis review was selected for publication from the Art Criticism course for Honours students at UCT's Michaelis School of Fine Art
The title of the exhibition currently on view at the Stevenson Gallery, taken from the artist’s personal and very self-depreciating statement about the works on display, is misleading on many levels. Working from his house in Ocean View, Peter Clarke has been creating concertina books using a collage technique that combines found objects and scraps of printed materials with watercolour and other media. Spread across discreet shelves that run along the walls of the semi-dark gallery space, they sparkle like bright multi-coloured jewels. The bigger ones zigzag their way along the dark walls, inviting us to look but not touch thanks to the clever positioning of the shelves close to eye level. The smaller ones explode out of their precious little boxes in streams of colour inside a glass table vitrine that teases us with its open sides while keeping them safe from the crudeness of possible touch.
05 September 2013 - 12 October 2013
Listings(s)
Homage
David Brown, David Koloane, Gavin Younge, Louis Maqhubela, Peter Clarke, Pippa Skotnes, Fritha Langerman, Willie Bester, Malcolm Payne, Stephen Inggs and William Kentridge at Michaelis GalleryA portfolio of prints paying tribute to the life and work of Cecil Skotnes. Contributing artists include Willie Bester, David Brown, Norman Catherine, Peter Clarke, Stephen Inggs, William Kentridge, David Koloane, Fritha Langerman, Louis Maqhubela, Malcolm Payne, Pippa Skotnes and Gavin Younge. Proceeds from the sale of the portfolio will go towards the newly founded Cecil Skotnes Scholarship at the Michaelis School of Fine Art.
28 July 2009 - 21 August 2009
