Archive: Issue No. 54, Februray 2002

Hylton Nel treats his plates and bowls as three-dimensional canvases, using them to try out an endlessly fresh stream of ideas, shapes, literary allusions, erotica, images drawn from life or redrawn from sources ranging from the classics to a child's drawing. What freedom and wit. And yet all these alluring images are fused inseparably to their form - seductive as each drawing is, on a flat surface it would lack the insouciance gained by being placed on a softly curved, luminously glazed form. And the glazes are enough to make the heart sing - ranging from the translucent and smoke-like to intense and exquisitely luminous greens, blues and yellows. His ceramic sculptures, too - his strange, dyspeptic cats and dogs; his lumpy, often bawdy humans, each rendered with a lightness of touch but with total authority - have earned him his place as probably the most important artist working in ceramics in this country.

"About work, what can I say? I take both East and West as my cultural heritage. I work as best as I can with the past for inspiration. Most of what I make are plates. The same shape over and over, but, like people, each one different. That means I don't have to think too much about the shape and can concentrate on the thing that mostly gets me going, namely colour alone or combined with other colours, lines, blotches. The subject matter comes after. It could be simply patterns, or it could be figurative. In the last case, it often comes from things I read. I read almost anything." - Taken from the catalogue Hylton Nel Retrospective Exhibition, edited by Dr Melanie Hillebrand (ISBN 0-9584284-1-7)

The excellent retrospective of Nel's ceramic oeuvre is in its final two days at the UCT Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town. Curated by Melanie Hillebrand, the show is a total visual feast, allowing Nel's work to be seen en masse for the first time ever. It has proved to be one of the most popular shows at the museum in years, and allows the viewer to trace the different strains of Nel's interests in images, glazes, colours and styles over the years.

The exhibition moves to the King George VI Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth, on February 19, museum home of the curator, where it will hang until June. The exhibition is accompanied by an excellent catalogue sponsored by Nel's London dealer, Moira Benigson and by Clarke's Bookshop in Cape Town.

Born in N'Kana in 1941. Currently lives and work in Bethulie, a small town in the Free State.
Selected exhibitions:
2001-2	'Hylton Nel Retrospective Exhibition', Standard Bank National Festival of the Arts, Grahamstown; Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg; Johannes Stegmann Art Gallery, University of the Free State; King George VI Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth
2000	'Seduced by Colour: The New Maiolica', Toronto
1998	Group exhibition, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 'Down to Earth: New Ceramics from South Africa', Long House, East Hampton, New York
1997	'New Ceramics by Hylton Nel', The Fine Art Society, London
1996	'Hylton Nel - A Prayer for Good Governance', The Fine Art Society, London 'Gay Rights Re-Writes', Gertrude Posel Gallery, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
1989	Solo exhibition, Christopher Farr, London
1985	Cape Town Triennial
Public Collections:
Durban Art Gallery King George VI Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth South African National Gallery, Cape Town Tatham Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg William Humphreys Art Gallery, Kimberley University of Natal Corobrik Collection