Archive: Issue No. 135, November 2008

29.10.08 Pierre Fouché at Bell-Roberts
27.11.08 'Summer 08/09' at Michael Stevenson
27.11.08 'Bad form' at blank projects
08.11.08 Robert Hodgins at Goodman Gallery
03.12.08 Michaelis Graduate Show at the Michaelis School of Fine Art
13.11.08 Artworks in Progress at the Michaelis Gallery
03.11.08 Jan Neethling at Erdmann Contemporary
29.10.08 'The Bijou burns again' at UCA Gallery
05.11.08 'How the troubles started' at Whatiftheworld / Gallery
12.11.08 Andrew Verster at Iziko SANG
06.11.08 Clare Menck and Colbert Mashile at IArt
03.11.08 'Painting and Drawing' at João Ferreira
17.11.08 Peter Clarke, Paul Birchall and Eris Silke at AVA
26.11.08 Cathy Abraham and Jenny Schneider at João Ferreira
18.11.08 Peter van Straten at Irma Stern
27.11.08 Jeanette Unite at the Western Cape Archive

7.10.08 Anton Kannemeyer at Michael Stevenson
7.10.08 Odili Odita at Michael Stevenson
7.10.08 Jost Kirsten and Natasja de Wet at AVA
7.10.08 Robert Slingsby at Rose Korber
7.10.08 'Lens Magic' at Tokara

9.08.08 'Decade' at Sanlam Art Gallery

'Convoluted Involvement' is Absa L'Atelier Award 2007 winner Pierre Fouché's second solo at Bell-Roberts. The exhibition is the result of six months spent at the Cité Internationale des Arts. Fouché manipulates source photographs into different entities altogether via predominantly needlecraft techniques - something he first introduced in 2006's 'The Distance Between Us'. This time around the artist limits the media he uses to black and white, allowing him to view the source images 'beyond the confines of the keyhole, to inscribe himself onto them in personal yet respectfully meditative, non-vindictive terms, and thus to see them beyond the personally obvious'.

Fouché is a Cape Town-based sculptor and draughtsman who received his MA in Fine Arts (cum laude) from the University of Stellenbosch in 2006. His work is characterised by labour-intensive, often traditional craft-based techniques, ephemeral process remnants, and sometimes performance and interventionist public work. He has participated in various group shows, most recently 'A Legacy of Men' at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Opens: October 29
Closes: November 28

Michael Stevenson's 13th annual summer exhibition will take on a fresh format in the gallery's new space in Woodstock. The exhibition will focus on 10 projects, some by well-known gallery artists including Nicholas Hlobo, Deborah Poynton, Zanele Muholi and David Goldblatt, others by artists showing with the gallery for the first time, such as Paul Edmunds, Andrew Putter and Daniel Naudé.

Hlobo's large-scale sculpture, Umphanda ongazaliyo, the focal point of his solo show for the Momentum series at the ICA in Boston, will be installed in the gallery. Edmunds will show new works that are part of a larger series to be exhibited at the gallery in late 2009. This body of work began with a story Edmunds wrote about growing up on Johannesburg's East Rand in the 70s and 80s, and his relationship with surf and skate culture of the time. The works draw on the shapes, forms, materials and other concerns of this facet of popular culture, which Edmunds describes as 'always seeming to remain just out of my reach, but which have apparently branded themselves indelibly into my memory'.

Putter, in a new series of photographs, continues to explore the term 'Hottentots Holland', which was the starting point for his Spier Contemporary award-winning video installation Secretly I Will Love You More. Putter's photographs meticulously recreate 17th-century Dutch still-life paintings, but in these arrangements the flowers, vessels, rocks and insects are all indigenous to the pre-colonial Cape. A group of new self-portraits by Youssef Nabil will be exhibited to accompany the release of his major monograph, just published by Hatje Cantz. A new series of portraits of lesbian women by Muholi will also be shown, as well as works in Goldblatt's ongoing Intersections Intersected series, including his poignant image of the new stadium in Green Point, Cape Town.

Opens: November 27
Closes: January 10

'Bad form' is curated by Kathryn Smith and Christian Nerf and will be the inaugural show at blank projects' new space in Woodstock.

Opens: November 27
Closes: January 31

Robert Hodgins, one of South Africa's most loved and admired artists, shows a new collection of paintings that brings together a sensual aesthetic of heightened colour and expressive form with his trademark intelligent humour and searing insights. Everyday scenarios range from theatrical scenes, hotel encounters and beach escapades to ruminations on relationships and mortality.

Opens: November 8
Closes: November 29

An increasingly important event on the local and national arts calendar, the Graduate Show at the Michaelis School of Fine Art is a unique opportunity to view the emerging talent graduating from one of South Africa's top art schools and to get a first glimpse of the new face of art that will, if previous shows are anything to go by, dominate the market.

Many past graduates have gone on to have significant solo shows and gain international exposure. Institutional and private collectors make a point of attending the show to see what new and fresh faces may be out there.

This year the graduate show will be opened as part of the launch of the Daniel Gordon Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts. This institute will include Music, Dance, Fine Art, Drama, Film and Creative Writing, and will generate projects in all these areas, encouraging, in particular, interdisciplinarity. The Graduate show will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue that will contextualise the work on display.

Opens: December 3
Closes: December 19

Volume 9 of Artworks in Progress, the Journal of the Staff of the Michaelis School of Fine Art (University Of Cape Town) will be launched at the Michaelis Gallery at 6pm, November 13. Almost 20 years since its inception, this volume continues the tradition established by Bruce Arnott to showcase the research produced by staff in the University's Fine Art department. Artworks in Progress features work by full and part-time staff of Michaelis with accompanying texts that range from Ed Young's inflammatory press to Virginia MacKenny's insightful theoretical essay on the nature of correspondence and analogy within artmaking.

The exhibition accompanying the launch showcases works from the publication by the full-time staff at the school, including Jane Alexander, Fritha Langerman, Virginia MacKenny, Svea Josephy, Jean Brundrit, Pippa Skotnes, Carine Zaayman, Kurt Campbell, Andrew Lamprecht, Nasan Pather, Malcolm Payne, Gavin Younge and Stephen Inggs.

Opens: November 13
Closes: November 28

Jan Neethling's new work is inspired by British street artist Banksy. In his first solo exhibition at Erdmann Contemporary, 'Uncle Six Fingers', Neethling showcases a wide variety of landscapes, still-lives and nudes that echo the irreverent freedom of that street art precedent. Neethling uses photographic source material, but focuses on the strange distortions of images, and through a process of layered painting, he achieves the exaggerated texture and distinctive 'look'.

Neethling was born in London in 1938 and studied art at the Technical College in Pretoria. In 1958 he met fellow artist and then lecturer Robert Hodgins and over a period of four decades Neethling and Hodgins mounted several innovative exhibitions in South Africa.

Opens: November 3
Closes: December 5

The newly opened UCA Gallery in Observatory exhibits the work of artists from the nearby Bijou studios. The result is an eclectic mix of painting and mixed media that showcases some well-established artists from the area, namely Liza Grobler, Pierre Fouché, Norman O'Flynn, Tamsin Reilly, Wonder Martinus, Albert Coertse and Christopher Slack.

Opens: October 29
Closes: November 28

'How the troubles started' presents the work of Wilhelm Saayman and Lizza Littlewort, two artists whose renown in the contemporary art scene is based in dark humourous commentary conveyed through annotated drawings which stretch and wrench graphic language. Here, the two are brought together for the first time, and from the outset the intense contrasts and similiarites in their work set up a strong debate. The setting is the context of South Africa, around which they weave a dark shadowy mesh of tales.

Saayman's work heads into the underbelly of the human condition, and is peopled with a rich population of sharply observed characters: the dodgy, the dangerous, as well as the guttingly human and despairingly personal. His highly evolved anti-art style places his work neck-and-neck with the bleak and brilliant humour of British contemporaries like David Shrigley, and brings to his work the urgency and power usually only found in the drawings of children or the criminally insane.

Littlewort's work for this show forms a hilariously bleak comment on the predicament of contemporary art in South African society. To 'get' much of the content of contemporary art, its audience needs a level of knowledge about art that is simply not the norm in South Africa, leaving the 'art world' cut adrift in an absurd conversation with itself. The show centres around a picture book, Let's buy some art for Christmas, in which Littlewort weaves a droll storyline from common platitudes about art. She interprets themes from the book through cartoonish paintings and painterly cartoons, providing a send-up of romanticised genius and a very concise crash course in Art Criticism 101.

Opens: November 5
Closes: November 29

'Past/Present' is a survey of works by Andrew Verster who turned 71 this year. The exhibition's point of departure is 1994 - the start of democracy in South Africa - and shows work produced from that time to the present. The artist places significance on this particular period as it has been a milestone for personal and political freedom, mainly due to the new Constitution which grants equal rights to all. Speaking as a gay man, Verster claims that 'For the first time in my life I became legal.' His work reflects a sense of liberation and joyousness which seems to have recently burst forth.

Curated by Carol Brown, 'Past/Present' is a multi-media exhibition consisting of paintings, drawings, stage sets, costume designs and wax panels. The intention is to showcase the diversity and consistent creativity of one of the country's most prolific and respected artists.

Opens: November 12
Closes: March 22, 2009

Painters Clare Menck and Colbert Mashile exhibit simultaneously at IArt. Whilst both artists' work looks dissimilar, a common thread unites the two projects. This is the continuing desire to utilise the canvas as a vehicle to reflect on the self and the subconscious.

Mashile's work deals with various issues and ideas around contested definitions of black masculinity, and increasingly with broader social issues. For this exhibition, it is the fears and desires of the personal subconscious that come under the spotlight. He describes his painting process as a 'journey' during which he 'wanders over the canvas'. Colour becomes the primary vehicle to harness the emotive impact of the canvas.

Clare Menck concentrates on the ability of paint to convey something of the personal and much of her work can be described as autobiographical, despite its often mundane and everyday subject matter. Menck's work for this exhibition concentrates on still-lives and interiors. The objects all speak of a wealth of personal associations, which invite the viewer to explore the artist's inner world in terms of the 'fetishes' she fondles with her paintbrush.

Opens: November 6
Closes: November 20

'Painting and drawing' showcases a group of local and international artists who engage with the international discourse around painting and drawing. The artists include Anthony Scullion, Luke Human, Lauryn Arnott, Anton Karstel and Karl Gietl.

Opens: November 3
Closes: November 29

Peter Clarke exhibits 'Second Childhood', a collection of delicate and whimsical works on paper. Clarke is a veteran of the South African art world and with this exhibition he asserts the power of age and experience in order to open up new avenues for experimentation. Clarke explains: 'In spite of what they say, quite simply when you're over 70 play doesn't have to be only the leisurely activity of the very young. Why can't it be that of the mature taking chances, doing things, letting things happen, different, unexpected, going off in other directions, course changes when so inclined? What about spontaneity? The good thing now that I am 79 is I don't have to tow a particular line. Unlike before, I am free to experiment even with absurdity, blissfully, to explore second childhood.'

Eris Silke returns to the AVA with 'The Prince'. Silke delves fearlessly into sensuality, fantasy and the fables of childhood. An established master of her medium, Silke creates picture planes rich in lyrical detail. Surrealist inner worlds reveal to us the shadows and fantasies inherent in the folds of our memories. Silke's work is extensively collected locally and internationally and is housed in reputed public collections like Iziko South African National Gallery and the Chase Manhattan Bank Collection in New York.

Paul Birchall exhibits 'Re-Turning Heroes' a continuing development from the well received 'The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor' shown at the KKNK in 2008. This mixed media body of work combines traditional collage with video, animating quiet nostalgic moments that negotiate with whimsy the man in uniform.

Opens: November 17
Closes: December 5

Cathy Abraham has produced a multi-dimensional body of work over the past year, culminating in the collaborative exhibition 'Naked'. Primarily using a classic Hasselblad camera, Schneider produces photographic images which she makes available to Abraham. Her carefully-chosen and sensitive black and white nature photographs are digitally printed onto canvas and subtly sepia-toned. Out of and onto these images of rock, water and trees, Abraham layers multiple films of muted glazes, creating figures that merge diaphanously with their natural environment and become indissolubly part of the landscape. The glazed bodies meld with the bark and twisted tree forms, irreducibly part of them; elsewhere, they seamlessly waft through the very fabric of rock and seawater: the sinuous crack in a submerged rock is a human spine; the mottled skin of the figure is that of the lichen-encrusted, ever-changing seabed.

Filled with nuance and suggestion, embracing notions of light and dark in both metaphorical and aesthetic senses, and employing the naked body as a vehicle through which to explore such themes as truth, courage, personal growth, honesty and intrinsic value, the body of work as a whole evokes a hidden transcendence. Here, the nakedness of the figures is not a political statement, but a deeply felt internal truth. It functions as a metaphor for Abraham's core, her very essence. At times, an oddly contorted pose that nevertheless makes physical and psychic sense, a human figure blends and merges with its surroundings. Skin becomes an ephemeral garment.

Opens: November 26
Closes: December 20

Called 'The Silence and the Bell', Peter van Straten's exhibition title recalls 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' - Hemingway's opus on war and lost innocence. The bell's appeal for van Straten is located as much in the viscera of sound and spirit as in innocence and corruption. As the artist explains 'The bell [was] used to call people to help look for the spirit. The chime of the bell does not end, but diminishes so gradually as to become one, seamlessly, with silence'.

Van Straten's paintings are panoramic vistas rendered in oils, with sweeping, intersecting arcs in which heaven and earth shift. His skies appear electrically charged - the afterglow of an eerily luminescent sunrise or sunset. Or they might be the product of a powerful hallucinogenic. His landscapes are populated by an assortment of folk, but they are not necessarily characters but rather embodiments of innocence, fecundity and age, enacting parables against sumptuous backdrops and Turner-esque skies. Lest we should become too immersed in the celestial pageantry of the paintings, there are those signature van Stratenisms - unexpected motifs, cynical titles and other indices of satire - that yank us back to earth.

Born in 1972, his career was spawned during the most formative years of South African post-apartheid art history, but he works pretty much in an isolated conceptual space. Although he works at the canvas like one obsessed, his love affair is not with paint per se. For him paintings are merely 'thoughts with paint stuck to them'.

Opens: November 18
Closes: December 6

Jeannette Unite has delved into some of the 45 kilometres of records, stored in eight floors of Cape Archives strongrooms and other depositories, and is working on a series of headgear drawings. This exhibition is a consolidation of visual documentation from travels to mines and industrial areas around the country and a reinterpretation of historical imagery.

'Remembering the Future' is an extension of 'Earthscars; A Visual Mining Exploration' expanding the abstract visual possibilities through the surface-mining engineering works and linking this with content that has relevance ecologically, economically, geologically, geographically, historically, socially and technologically.

Opens: September 8
Closes: late November

Also known as Joe Dog, the creator of darkly satirical comics published in the Bitterkomix anthologies of which he is co-editor, Anton Kannemeyer is a prolific producer of prints and drawings, and has recently extended his practice to include paintings in acrylic on canvas. The shift in medium allows him to translate his subversive imagery onto a larger scale, heightening the awkward relationship viewers often have with his work. Kannemeyer will also exhibit large-scale drawings for the first time, in addition to smaller drawings and prints.

In April 2008 Kannemeyer held his first New York exhibition, titled 'The Haunt of Fears'. The exhibition, at Jack Shainman Gallery, was praised in the New York Times for its 'semiotic sophistication, graphic ingenuity and X-ray political vision'. Here, Kannemeyer continues his investigation of the fear and anxiety that underlie South Africa's fragile democracy. As always in his work, the thin veneer of polite white society is peeled back to expose the hypocrisy and racism that lurk beneath, but Kannemeyer is as relentless in his critique of the corruption and greed endemic amongst the country's new political elite. Socio-politics and the individual psyche are equally scrutinised in the ongoing Alphabet of Democracy series and related N is for Nightmare works.

Born in 1967 and based in Cape Town, Kannemeyer has been publishing and exhibiting his work since 1992, the year he and Conrad Botes founded Bitterkomix as students at the University of Stellenbosch. Recent group exhibitions include 'Artists at Castagnoli' in Gaiole, Italy (2007); 'From Trentino South Tyrol to the Rest of the World' and 'Back at Kunst Merano Arte' in Merano, Italy (2007); and 'Africa Comics' at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2006).

Kannemeyer will give a walkabout of his exhibition for the Friends of the National Gallery on Thursday 23 October at 11am.

Opens: October 16
Closes: November 22

Odili Odita's work was initially shown at Michael Stevenson on 'Distant Relatives/Relative Distance' (2006), an exhibition of work by contemporary African artists living elsewhere in the world, and which travelled to the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg. 'Double Edge', Odita's show at Michael Stevenson, will comprise a suite of paintings informed by the mural process.

For Odita, colour and form represent the brief moment before concepts are applied in the form of language, like the multicoloured flash that precedes the image on old television sets. The title, 'Double Edge', speaks to these twinned concerns of form and culture. Odita's interest in colour is as much an engagement with the history of colour theory as it is a reflection of his interest in global trade routes. At the time when pigments were still based on natural commodities, trade centres such as the Netherlands were at the epicentre of colour experimentation. Odita's dialogue with modernist ideas about form is similarly double-edged, also reflecting his belief in contemporaneous internationalist ideals. And now, through the extension of his practice to murals, his ideas about painting have become, equally, ideas about architecture.

Born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1966, Odita lives and works in Philadelphia and New York. He is an Associate Professor of Fine Art at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia.

Opens: October 16
Closes: November 33

Namibian artist Jost Kirsten exhibits 'Ashes', a body of wooden sculptures that interrogates a fascination with the transition between one form and another. Kirsten uses flame conceptually and physically to scar and reveal the sculpture hidden in the wood. He consciously binds the traditional and historical properties associated with the particular wood into the form of the sculpture.

Alongside this, another existential investigation is presented: Natasja de Wet's 'Thicker Skin' uses the image of a rosebud as the metaphor for the human condition. Different materials such as fabric, latex, gauze, bandages, rubber and paper are used to refer to issues such as camouflage, hiding, insecurity and sexuality.

Opens: October 27
Closes: November 14

Cape Town artist Robert Slingsby's career has spanned more than three decades. Underlying this period remains his obsessive fascination with the ancient rock paintings or petroglyphs - those mysterious, non-figurative images to be found in the Richtersveld (near the Orange River, on South Africa's north-western border) and other world sites. Although Slingsby's work has evolved as he has developed his own alphabet of petroglyphs, the core of inspiration behind his works remains the story on the rocks - a sub-text that informs his extensive and dynamic oeuvre of paintings and sculpture.

In Comic Affair, a highly charged painting done in 2007, Slingsby alludes to the current climate of global insecurity - resulting from terrorist threats - that has seen the emergence of a paranoid society. On his frequent travels over the last year, he felt confronted by the constant surveillance at airports and in the streets, as well as by the feeling of being exposed and intimidated by 'big brother' threats, real or perceived. The presence of female nudes in this work expresses feelings of invasion of privacy and vulnerability, of being absorbed into a way of life that is beyond our control. The imagery includes familiar objects such as aeroplanes, suitcases and nudes in a setting in the midst of conveyor belts, satellites and surveillance equipment - all superimposed over a substructure of images inspired by petroglyphs.

Throughout Slingsby's latest body of work, produced in 2008, his signature technique dictates the quintessentially linear style of his painting: his preoccupation with line as found in the geometric shapes of the rock art of the Richtersveld.

Opens: October 1
Closes: November 15

'Lens Magic' showcases diverse images from Andrew Barker, Brendan Bell, Jac de Villiers, Michael Hall, Obie Oberholzer, Inge Prins and Roger Young.

Barker and Oberholzer use traditional photographic methods, relying on technique and interpretation to create images that capture the spirit of the subject. They do not manipulate their images in any way - the ambient light is their prime tool added to their particular way of perceiving the world. Oberholzer's arresting self-portrait Visual Thug illustrates his view that, given the number of images which bombard us daily, he intends his work to 'make people stop for a moment, become inquisitive and to have a second look at the image.' In contrast, works by Bell and Prins experiment with still life - Bell digitally manipulates his own photographs to create new, fantasy environments, inhabited by objects we know, many of which refer to aspects of South African history. Prins' smoke series is like a meditative poem on the passing of time and the subtlety of light, as if the smoke is photographed as still life - a moment in a fleeting existence is captured by her lens.

De Villiers is exhibiting six images called Restaurant at the end of the world, which depict the dignity of 'arid life'. Young is fascinated by rural South Africa and wherever he finds himself on his travels, he engages with people and places. His evocative images seem to summon collective memory in people whose home this land is, while providing empathetic insight for viewers to whom the scenes are foreign. Hall is interested in narrative photographic sequences, aiming to encourage his viewers to ask questions about what humans are doing to harm our planet. His Fear evokes memories of political protest and necklacing and also symbolises pollution and the degradation of the environment.

Opens: September 26
Closes: November 23

In celebrating the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Sanlam in 1918, the Sanlam Art Collection is presenting an exhibition highlighting the last ten years of acquisitions. Since 1997 Sanlam has added some 544 works by South African artists to its collection begun in 1965.

In keeping with the objective of compiling a representative collection of South African art, the exhibition of 83 works from the late 19th century to the present is a an eclectic mixture of past and present. As curator of the Collection, Stefan Hundt states: 'The exhibition attempts within in the limitations of the space available to present some of the most interesting works acquired over the last ten years. In the context of considerable demand for works by famous "Old Masters" on one hand and cutting-edge contemporary works on the other, some of the artists represented on this exhibition have almost been forgotten. I hope that to some degree this exhibition will re-introduce art lovers to the rich diversity that has made up South African art over the last century.'

Works on display range from a Frans Oerder watercolour (1899) depicting an interior to a 1970s watercolour of a view of Hout Bay by Durant Sihlali; and a beautiful almost surrealist landscape by Ricky Dyaloyi; sculptures by Johannes Maswanganyi, Edoardo Villa and Philipps Kolbe, to the gritty installations of Jan van der Merwe, Gavin Younge and Leora Faber.

Opens: August 7
Closes: January 16, 2009