Current Review(s)
Brice, Gratrix, Busuttil and the Principles of Painting: A review of three exhibitions
Lisa Brice at Goodman GalleryThe recent exhibitions of Carla Busuttil, Lisa Brice and Georgina Gratrix at various venues in Cape Town and Johannesburg have seemingly delivered some more hammer blows to the coffin lid of that incessant postmodern verbal tic, ‘painting is dead’. To add to this, Lisa Brice herself, perhaps unknowingly, delivered a few more nails to the undertakers at her walkabout at the Goodman Cape by sanctioning a liberal humanist theoretical stance.
Brice, in an off-the-cuff answer, said that she felt that painting is an investigative process, where one discovers how and what one is trying to communicate while painting. She added that her more conceptual works lacked that exploratory quality in that they were planned and constructed to a predetermined specification. The comment could have come straight out of that apotheosis of liberal humanist art theory, R.G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art. This was, after all, precisely the distinction he made between what he called ‘art proper’ and ‘technical theory of art’, or craft.
Art, Collingwood claimed, is an investigation into an emotional state while craft, or technical art, is limited by its planned understanding of the final object. Certainly all three of the artists mentioned above seem to exemplify painting’s investigative underpinnings. To be sure, the strengths and weaknesses of each of their exhibitions rely on how intimately they seem to understand their subjects.
10 March 2012 - 14 April 2012
Listings(s)
Editions for ArtThrob Print Exhibition
Guy Tillim, Jane Alexander, Lisa Brice, Peet Pienaar, David Goldblatt, Penny Siopis, Hentie van der Merwe, Robert Hodgins, Tracey Rose, Mikhael Subotzky, William Kentridge, Zwelethu Mthethwa and Nontsikelelo Veleko at South African Print GalleryEditions for ArtThrob is pleased to announce an exhibition of all artist prints in our collection at the South African Print Gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town. You are cordially invited to attend the opening finger lunch at 11:30am on Saturday the 29th of August, where all available prints will be for sale.
Editions for ArtThrob, in collaboration with South Africa’s leading artists, has developed a series of specially-commissioned prints; these are sold to cover the running costs of the ArtThrob website. ArtThrob is South Africa’s leading website on contemporary art, and is an important point of reference worldwide for curators, dealers and those interested in South African art.
Artists who have participated in the in the print program include William Kentridge, Penny Siopis, Robert Hodgins, Jane Alexander, Willem Boshoff, Nontsikelelo ‘Lolo’ Veleko, David Goldblatt, Guy Tillim, Lisa Brice, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Mikhael Subotzky, Peet Pienaar, Hentie van der Merwe and Tracey Rose.
In addition, we will be launching a brand new print by Robert Hodgins. Hot off the presses at Mark Attwood’s studio, the image will be available for preview the at exhibition opening.
Please contact Natasha Norman from ArtThrob for online orders or Gabriel Clark-Brown at the SA Print Gallery for more information.
29 August 2009 - 28 September 2009
'Alias' - Photomonth Krakow 2011
Ivan Vladislavic, Lisa Brice, Sean O Toole, David Goldblatt and William Kentridge at Various venues around KrakowPhotomonth is one of Poland's largest visual arts events and one of the leading European festivals of photography, comprising over fifty exhibitions and accompanying events. For the 2011 edition, curatorial team Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, who exhibited a photographic project at the event last year, have invited artists and writers to collaborate in pairs to create a fictive third persona.
Broomberg and Chanarin explain:
'Twenty-three writers (of fiction, fact and medical history) were each commissioned to create a text describing an invented persona, which was then assigned to a visual artist to inhabit. The work that accompanies these texts is the result of each individual artist’s residency in their fictitious character. It’s an experiment that was set up to fail, because it shouldn’t be that easy to stop being yourself; to break with your own particular political and ethical concerns. Yet most of the artists we approached bravely took up the challenge...'
13 May 2011 - 12 June 2011
'Throwing the Floor'
Lisa Brice at Goodman GalleryGoodman Gallery Cape presents an exhibition of new paintings by Lisa Brice, produced over the course of the last two years in London and featured in Vitamin P2, Phaidon's recently published anthology of painting. The paintings explore the possibilities and properties of vivid colour, how it is optically perceived, and the effects of the afterimage created by red-green vision in particular.
In her text on Brice's work in Vitamin P2, Coline Millard notes: 'Just as [Brice's] painting hovers between figuration and abstraction, her figures occupy the limbo between the living and the dead. Brice's work is all liminality.' While the liminality referred to by Millard in the Trinidad works of 2009 alludes to an inherent mysticism, the sense of liminality in this new body of paintings shifts to suggest a state of disorientation, delirium and suspended time through a heightened use of colour and reduced form.
'Throwing the Floor' is Brice's first solo exhibition in Cape Town since 2007.
10 March 2012 - 14 April 2012
'Cut Your Throat'
Lisa Brice at French RivieraLisa Brice exhibits a new selection of paintings - with text by Sean O'Tool here.
19 September 2014 - 26 October 2014
