Archive: Issue No. 107, July 2006

7.07.06 Wim Botha at Standard Bank Gallery
7.07.06 Bronwyn Lace at the Parking Gallery
7.07.06 Bill Ainslie at Afronova
7.07.06 Cecil Skotnes at Goodman Gallery
7.07.06 Sarel Petrus, Dylan Graham and Cobus Haupt at Artspace
7.07.06 Louis Minnaar at gordart Gallery's Project Room
7.07.06 Jan van der Merwe at Pretoria Art Museum
7.07.06 Sean Slemon at David Krut
7.07.06 Frances Sanders at Obert Contemporary Melrose Arch
7.07.06 Fiona Couldridge and Michael Smith at gordart Gallery

2.06.06 'Paintings - Methven to Mashile' at Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art
 

Worthy heir to the position of important young figurative sculptor once occupied by Andries Botha, Wim Botha's output is fast achieving canonical status in SA. Standard Bank has recognised this and made Botha their 2005 Young Artist for Visual Arts. The award show ends its travels in Johannesburg, at the Standard Bank Gallery.

Since 2001, Botha has shown frequently both locally and abroad, and has won numerous awards. His inclusion on the international shows 'Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art' and 'African Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent' secured his position as one of this country's young artists to watch.

While chiefly known as a sculptor, Botha resists narrow definitions and chooses to operate as a multiple media artist. 'Premonitions of War', typical of his work, incorporates sculptures, prints, paintings and drawings, which he uses in a process of deconstructing icons of the home, state, Afrikanerdom, art history, religion and Western civilisation. Both in Durban and Cape Town, Botha has incorporated work from the host museum's collection into his installation.

Opens: June 13
Closes: July 15

The parking Gallery's second show features the work of young artist Bronwyn Lace this month. This show entitled '77/21', is the third in a series dealing with the 'Phi', an irrational number whose application in design is deemed to render the most aesthetically pleasing results and which is found to underlie many natural phenomena. In the work Lace explores notions of beauty, and the relationship between science, art and nature.

Opens: June 22
Closes: July 12

The life and work of influential artist, teacher and mentor Bill Ainslie come under the spotlight at Afronova at the Market Theatre Precinct this month. Featuring important drawings and paintings, the show is billed as a tribute to a 'vigorous artist, a gentle man who loved life and a charismatic cultural activist with a crucial legacy'. Ainslie established the Johannesburg Art Foundation and served as teacher and mentor to many important South African artists such as Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi and Jill Trappler.

Opens: June 23
Closes: July 22

One of the first South African artists to productively problematise culture and representation, Cecil Skotnes celebrates his career and 80th birthday at the Goodman this month with this appropriately titled show 'Contemplation'. The exhibition concentrates on Skotnes' interest in different aspects of the South African and Namibian landscape.

Using the show as an opportunity for reflection, the artist's daughter, established artist and educator Pippa Skotnes, writes, 'His has been a rich and rewarding career from which many have benefited - his family, his students, young artists, his friends and those who have bought and bartered his work. His contribution has been recognised by all those who love him and his art, by universities who have conferred honorary degrees on him (UCT, Wits and Rhodes) and by the State President with the award of a gold medal for service to the country and, in particular, for his contribution to the de-racialision of South African art'. This one is not to be missed.

Opens: June 24
Closes: July 15

Three young artists from Pretoria present a show of recent work, curated by Teresa Lizamore, at Artspace this month. Dylan Graham is a painter whose work is concerned with breaking the elements of his process, i.e. the paint, the surface, the subject, down to their essences. Cobus Haupt is a sculptor who works from live models, conducting his initial process in clay and then casting in bronze, cement or hydrostone. The foregrounded tangibility of his works emphasises our physical existence in a 3-dimensional world. Sarel Petrus makes sculptures from found remnants of living things, skin, bones, hair, excrement, re-contextualizing these components in an unpremeditated manner in order to beautify the ordinary.

Opens: July 2
Closes: July 29

Inspired by childhood memories, fantasies, images and characters from old TV programmes, Louis Minnaar's 'Circus' comprises a series of shaped drawings and sculptures. With tongue lodged firmly in cheek, Minnaar mines a kind of carnivalesque Surrealism reminiscent of 70's Monty Python animations. Impeccable rendering technique and an eye for the truly incongruous make this a tight, focussed little show.

Opens: June 28
Closes: July 14

Working as an 'archaeologist' excavating the stories and memories of and references to the past that hide in the objects others throw away, Jan van der Merwe presents a show entitled 'The Archaeology of Time' this month. Van der Merwe gives existing objects 'archaeological' status by covering them with layers of rusted steel cans. These objects become remnants of a way of life, a civilisation fallen into decay and fossilised by the passage of time and by rust. He places objects in an archaeological time capsule, thereby commanding intensive study, as is the case with real archaeological finds.

Van der Merwe's installations focus on the human situation, on victims of violence, political events and social realities.

Opens: June 28
Closes: October 29

2005 Sasol New Signatures winner Sean Slemon presents a show of etchings and an installation entitled 'Solid Light' at David Krut this month. Visiting SA during his summer break from New York's Pratt Institute where he is completing a Master's degree, Slemon produced a body of prints created with printer Jill Ross at the David Krut Print Workshop. The works on show map light as both a physical entity and a consumable commodity, intrinsically linked to wealth and power.

Opens: June 22
Closes: July 6

Nature, decorative design and ideas of ideal beauty influence this body of work by Frances Sanders. The works in 'Sweetest Earth I Love and Love Thee' express these ideas through silhouetted shapes and fluid lines. Sanders is a formally trained painter, and as such these works represent her first foray into digital printing and embroidery on silk, satin and canvas. The works explore a new synergy between art and technology, and are stretched over 40 watt, superflat, wall-mounted speakers.

Opens: July 6
Closes: July 31

Fiona Couldridge and Michael Smith present a show of recent work at gordart gallery this month. Entitled 'Scratch', the show explores the tension between internalised and externalised emotion. Couldridge has restricted her pallete significantly from her previous show, and works in impasto paint that borders on becoming sculptural. Her works frequently focus on breaks in the skin, and make use of an ingenious body-printing technique.

Smith works primarily in black and grey, coaxing small areas of detail and interest out of dense matrices of black. His work takes the works of Kasimir Malevich and Ad Reinhardt as a starting point, and attempts to re-inject politicised imagery into the 'purified' surface.

Opens: July 3
Closes: July 22

Warren Siebrits presents a survey show of painting spanning virtually a full century. Important early painters, representatives of struggle art and some strong new voices are on show. Siebrits' acumen as a dealer and purchaser of art is, as always, evident in this show, with some rare finds and important examples of stellar SA painting. Of particular interest is a sextet of Andrew Motjuaodi paintings portraying Mamelodi's Dr Fabian Ribeiro and family. Painted in 1965, the paintings now serve as a poignant eulogy to Dr Ribeiro and his wife Florence who were assassinated in 1986 by an apartheid death squad.

Opens: June 6
Closes: July 21