Archive: Issue No. 126, February 2008

10.02.08 Diane Victor at Goodman Gallery Cape
10.02.08 Lyndi Sales at Bell-Roberts
10.02.08 'Fresh Meat' at Whatiftheworld / Gallery
10.02.08 Barend de Wet at blank projects
10.02.08 Robert Hodgins at Bell-Roberts Lourensford
10.02.08 Brent Meistre at the Photographer's Gallery
10.02.08 Andrew McIlleron at 34 Long
10.02.08 'Verf' at blank contemporary
10.02.08 Gail Caitlin at Joao Ferreira
10.02.08 Karin Miller at Focus Contemporary
10.02.08 'Karoo to City' at Rust-en-Vrede Gallery
10.02.08 Joe's Choice at AVA
10.02.08 Colleen Gericke and Selvin November at AVA
10.02.08 Marinda du Toit at CUBE

13.01.08 David Goldblatt at Michael Stevenson
13.01.08 'Greatest Hits 2007' at AVA

02.12.07 'Spier Contemporary Art Awards' at Spier
02.12.07 'Sasol Wax Art Awards Exhibition' at Iziko SANG
02.12.07 Willie Bester at Iziko SANG

04.11.07 'Is there Still-life?' at the Old Town House

STELLENBOSCH

10.02.08 Portraits at SMAC

PAARL

10.02.08 Andy Goldsworthy and Ouattara Watts at Glen Carlou

For the first solo exhibition in Cape Town by Diane Victor, the renowned printmaker who in 2005 was awarded the Gold Medal for Visual Art by the South African Academy of Arts and Sciences, the artist produces a new body of drawings that employ smoke, stain and charcoal techniques and prints utilising etching and blind embossing.

Victor's post-apocalyptic visions of South Africa explore the topography of fear and paranoia in the local and the post-9/11 global context. Responding to the morbid fascination with natural disasters, criminal violence and destruction proliferating in the news media and popular entertainment, Victor comments on and engages with fantasies of devastation by imagining local South African venues, monuments and popular entertainment venues as if struck by disaster.

The continuing stain drawing series entitled The stains of the fathers, explores notions of damage and violence stained into the psyches of successive generations and the ways in which these processes taint the physical and psychological relations between people. The smoke and embossing works continue Victor's exploration of ideas and fantasies relating to violence and social decay and the fragility of human existence.

Born in 1964 in Witbank, Victor majored in printmaking at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1986 and has been an influential lecturer at the University of Pretoria and several other art institutions. She has exhibited widely both locally and internationally, been selected for the UNESCO residency in Vienna, Austria and the Vermont Studio residency, amongst others. She has won numerous awards, most recently at the Krakow Print Triennial in Poland in 2007. She is represented in major local and international collections such at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Opens: February 7
Closes: March 1

Since her solo exhibition at Bell-Roberts in 2006, Lyndi Sales' intricate and evocative works have featured on the 'Committee and Critic's Choice' exhibition at the AVA and in the Spier Contemporary Art Awards. These achievements reflect a significant upsurge in interest in her ethereal works. With her second solo exhibition at the Bell-Roberts, entitled 'Transient', Sales continues to explore the moment of death/transcendence from a personal perspective. Here the aeroplane journey acts as a metaphor for departures and arrivals. Flying becomes symbolic of transition, transcendence and a state of unpredictability. The tunnel of light scenario and the vortex are explored as a portal between the known and the unknown.

Opens: February 6
Closes: March 1

'Fresh Meat' is a show of new painting curated by Artheat creator Robert Sloon. Including the likes of Trasi Henen, Lisa Brice, Matt Hindley, Linda Stupart, Jake Aikman and others, Sloon puts together a collection of young artists intent on mining paintings' conceptual depths. Sloon explains: 'A couple of young deer graze in the forestry undergrowth. The dappled light plays along their fawn hinds, as they browse on the fine greenery. Dreaming of happy deer things. A twig snaps. A panther, black as night, swoops out a tree and stalks away with a deer dangling by its throat. A trace of blood smears a leaf. A meal is sustenance for some, and gory death for others.

'Painting has had a long and tiresome history. It has been the yardstick by which people measure art. It has moved in and out of fashion. At the height of the modernist movement it was declared dead, a victim of its own diminishing returns, on its last legs, eating its last dinner. Then a twig snapped.

'This metaphor of life and death, destruction and creation, although sounding unfortunately like it could be sung by Elton John, moves in the paintings on this show too. It reflects on the vigour that contemporary painters have brought to the medium, having supped well. It also reflects on the themes many of the paintings work with. And it, perhaps, reflects on the time in which we live, where the world is not necessarily a safe place to hang out.'

Opens: January 25
Closes: February 23

The renowned, revered and reviled conceptual artist Barend de Wet shows an installation entitled 'White Elephants' at blank projects. The installation shows redundant electronic objects and a 3-d portrait quite literally painted white.

Opens: February 13
Closes: March 2

Robert Hodgins has exhibited extensively in Europe and the South Africa and the work of this octogenarian can be found in private and public collections both locally and internationally. However this is only the second exhibition of ceramic works by Hodgins in 18 years, making this exhibition almost a retrospective of his works made between 1989 and 2007.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an extensive coffee table book documenting Hodgins' ceramic work, researched and written by Retief van Wyk and published by Bell-Roberts Publishing. Special limited editions, including an original artwork and signed by the artist, will also be available.

Opens: February 9
Closes: March 1

Award-winning Eastern Cape photographer Brent Meistre will be showing at the Photographer's Gallery. Meistre approaches the city as a text to be edited. Through the process of photographically editing the city, the viewfinder as a place of transgression and manipulation is highlighted.

Meistre playfully probes the accepted teaching and reception of words, and words in relation to images. At the same time, because of the way the images are appropriated and re-contextualised, the slippages between the signifier and signified, and the play of meanings are brought to the fore.

The opening will be conducted by Prof Michael Godby.

Opens: February 1
Closes: March 1

Shack fires are a direct result of the migration of rural people to the cities, usually in search of a better life for their families. Migrants often have little option but to live in high-density shanty towns with minimal or no public services - fertile ground for accidents.

This body of photographic work by Andrew McIlleron centres around a blaze which took place in Joe Slovo informal setlement in May 2006. Joe Slovo is approximately 8km from central Cape Town and is home to some of South Africa's poorest people. There had been a fire on the adjacent piece of land the previous year. Fire victims were moved to a temporary housing project in Delft while new houses were constructed on the site where the shacks had been razed by flames. This is the new N2 Gateway Development. The new flats are occupied, however, not by the victims of the fire as promised by the authorities.

The exhibition does not attempt to deal with political arguments around government's responsibilities to its poorest citizens. Rather, it is a visual poem about lives caught up in promises made and not kept.

Opens: February 12
Closes: March 15

'Verf' is a group show by five young artists working in painting and mixed media. Participating are Marna Hattingh, Christo Basson, Hannes Bernard, Katrin Coetzer and Alex Emsley.

Opens: February 13
Closes: March 30

After receiving a grant and ten years of experimentation, Gail Catlin mastered the unique and complex technique of applying liquid crystal, a substance that changes colour when exposed to different temperatures, to her paintings. To date, she is the only artist in the world who has perfected this technique. The paintings literally 'dance' before you, reacting to body temperature or a passing cloud. They refract the light in different directions in a manner akin to a brilliant faceted diamond. Working mainly on the reverse side of glass, Catlin builds her mirror image layer by layer. Her paintings often contain a mixed palette of vibrant Indian inks, acrylic or clay.

Technique aside, it is Catlin's ability as a painter that should be fully recognised. Combining the human form and/or the animal study, particularly birds, is a recurring theme in Catlin's work. Aggressive distortions of proportion, anatomy and colour convey that these works are an expressionist statement rather than a naturalistic rendition of form. The juxtaposition of beauty and terror are ever-present in her work, the exposed and vulnerable female, the predatory bird or harsh terrain explore the fragility and rhythms of life.

Her work hangs in some of the most important public and corporate collections around the country. Catlin has represented South Africa in a solo exhibition at South Africa House in London, exhibited in Europe and won numerous awards and grand prix internationally.

Opens: February 13
Closes: March 1

Karin Miller combines traditional artwork skills and photography with modern technology, creating a fusion of past and present, personal and public. Miller has developed a unique style which exudes a rich eclecticism, playfulness, quirky humour and a post-modern element of neo-baroque. Often gathered around a central female figure, each facet of the image is carefully chosen and placed to form unexpected combinations and compositions. Her work often subtly suggests a uniquely South African ambience.

Miller was born in Pretoria in 1957. She trained as a graphic designer at the Tshwane University of Technology and spent many years working in this field. She later studied Fine Arts at Unisa, and eventually moved into the digital art-making field. Miller has contributed to numerous publications including Visi magazine as well as covers for De Kat. Miller has participated in various group exhibitions such as the Gordon Froud Klein Karoo Art Festival, the Ekurhuleni National Fine Arts Awards, and the New Signatures exhibition.

Opens: January 19
Closes: February 28

'Karoo to City' shows the work of Jonathan Deal and Cooper. Their richly textured images which include traditional Karoo landscapes, abstract cityscapes and vintage cars are exhibited in mixed media, from archival prints on fibre paper to block-mounted canvases.

Opens: February 12
Closes: March 6

This exhibition of specially selected work, entitled 'Joe's Choice', brings together the experienced, discerning eye of long-established art dealer, artist and collector, Joe Wolpe, with the artistic vision of Cape Town artist, Jill Trappler. It showcases a tight selection of works, in a variety of media from acrylic on canvas to etchings, made by Trappler over the last three decades. It is borne out of a studio showing by Trappler in July 2007 and Wolpe's abiding, strong interest in her extensive oeuvre.

For this show, Wolpe, himself an artist with a dedicated following, has made a strict choice of quality works sourced from Trappler's prodigious output. Wolpe's only criterion for inclusion is the standard and quality of the works themselves. Hence this exhibition does not conform to current curatorial paradigms and has neither a definite theme or subject, nor any chronological restrictions.

Trappler is well-known artist who has pursued her changing vision by exploring many modes of non-representation in her art. Trained at the Johannesburg Art Foundation (founded by her late uncle, Bill Ainslie), Trappler has relentlessly followed her creative impulse, producing primarily non-figurative acrylic pieces which examine her relationship with colour, scale, structure, shape, surface and texture, the last three being clearly of dominant interest. A weaver by training, she sometimes threads her canvas into shaped configurations not often found in more traditional painting practice.

Her work is represented in major corporate and public art collections which include SANG, Vodacom, SABC, Boland Bank and UCT. She continues to participate in art workshops and conferences, both local and international, and is currently working on a book about Bill Ainslie.

Opens: February 18
Closes: March 7

The first solo exhibition by Colleen Gericke, 'Neologism', interrogates a term used in linguistics that refers to the act of creating a new word or attaching a new meaning to an existing word. Says Gericke: 'We are all acquainted with the language of a plastic fork in a takeaway container, clingwrap covering a head of lettuce, red soda through multicoloured straws, a frayed pot-scourer in murky Sunlight water, plastic curlers in hair. I am inspired by the intimate familiarity of this language. I follow the vital principle that one should view all things as if for the first time; to view what is considered ordinary and mundane as uncommon and extraordinary. I therefore try to temporarily obscure the viewer's fixed memory of the everyday, to make room for free imagination, associations, fantasy, childhood memories and a touch of mystery. I use installation art to organise and distort household objects e.g. straws and pot scourers in such a way that their everyday function becomes misplaced.'

Selvin November shows 'The Portrait Speaks' on the Artsstrip. November interrogates portraiture, the way a subject is presented and how through this presentation the artist presents and exposes themselves. November negotiates notions of strength and beauty in the subject and explores, through this, memory and identity. The large mixed media works distort the traditional surface/skin associated with oil on canvas.

This is November's third solo exhibition at the AVA. He has participated in many group and curated exhibitions since 1989, including 'Upfront and Personal' at the Iziko SANG in 2004 and 'Who are they really' at XCape in 2007.

Opens: February 18
Closes: March 7

The installation 'Agenda' was inspired by Marinda du Toit's memories of the small town characters that peopled her world while she was growing up. Some of the most colourful ones convened once a week as the dorp's Chamber of Commerce, and it is this meeting that Du Toit depicts in her video installation. Thirteen characters are seated around a boardroom table, representing a whole spectrum of personalities from everyday life: The Chairman - small in posture, but of enormous voice; His Right-Hand Man - correct, diligent and an all round irritating chap; the Florist - well preserved, presented and a little flirty; the Thug - only there for the biscuits at teatime... Du Toit's installation was animated by Diek Grobler and Charles Badenhorst of Fopspeen Moving Pictures, and in the film a tea-girl serves this table of 'very important people' during a meeting. The meeting is, as such meetings usually are, very dull. The only action the committee members can hope for is the arrival of the tea girl.

Pretoria-based du Toit creates portraits of people from antique objects, rusted metal and junk. Like a modern-day Archimboldo, she fashions characters from discarded remnants of the tools of their trade, and objects from their implied histories and suggested lives. Due to the materials from which they are constructed, they often resemble antediluvian robots, but their demeanour, facial expressions, and souls, are decidedly human. She first attracted attention when she showed her junk sculptures in 2006 with a show entitled 'Little Bang'. Little Bang from that show has been shown on several international animation festivals, won a merit award at the Ekhuruleni Arts Competition, and was nominated for a SAFTA award for best short film in 2007.

Opens: February 6
Closes: March 1

David Goldblatt's photographs of the last decade are an ongoing exploration of the intersections between people, values and land in post-apartheid South Africa. They develop and take into new terrain the approach underlying much of his work in the years of apartheid, work which culminated in his monumental 'South Africa: the Structure of Things Then' which was shown at the SANG and the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1998.

In his solo show at Michael Stevenson, these continuities and developments are exemplified in two bodies of work. In the first, photographs from various essays undertaken in the years of apartheid are paired with photographs from his post-apartheid work. The resulting many-layered dynamic might be regarded as a meditation on continuity and change in South Africa. It also clearly reveals the connectedness of vision and thought that runs through all of Goldblatt's work - early and recent, black-and-white and colour.

Goldblatt has been critically exploring South African society through his photographs for more than half a century, has published a number of books and has received international recognition for his work. His retrospective, 'David Goldblatt: Fifty-one years', toured galleries and museums in New York, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels, Munich and Johannesburg between 2001 and 2005. He won the 2006 Hasselblad Award in recognition of his lifelong achievements.

Opens: January 16
Closes: March 1

'Greatest Hits 2007' will be a selected exhibition of graduate works curated by Lynette Bester and Kirsty Cockerill that will occupy all four gallery spaces at the AVA. Works have been selected from Michaelis UCT, Ruth Prowse, Stellenbosch University and Stellenbosch Academy. The exhibition offers an overview of the local and broader discourses that run through the four schools and reflects the quality of work produced by the students in 2007.

Opens: January 28
Closes: February 15

At the tailor-made gallery on south bank of the Spier Estate the exhibition of the top 100 entries for the Spier Contemporary Art Awards will be displayed. Selected by the Spier Contemporary panel, this exhibition promises to showcase some of the most exciting and innovative of contemporary art. The focus on sourcing art from across South Africa through an intensive selection process means that this will not be merely an outing of the usual suspects. And with no imposed theme, the exhibition is sure to highlight current artistic concerns.

Co-curator and selector Jay Pather remarked 'choosing 100 art works was both arduous as it was humbling. It was made more daunting in that there were so many performing arts entries together with the wealth of visual art. I found there was a fiercely established and assured sense of context in the work submitted. These works speak to the African and South African reality with voices that ranged from the intensely personal to the astutely political. If there was evidence of any lack, it spoke to lack of facility and opportunity. There was however, no lack of talent, vision and scope.'

Each of the 100 artists selected will qualify for a fee of R3 000 and in December five award-winners will be chosen by a panel of judges - they will share R700 000 in award monies to advance their artistic careers. The winners will be announced at the launch of the Spier Contemporary 2007 on December 12 at an opening event on the Spier Estate where the exhibition will be hosted.

Opens: December 12
Closes: February 29

The prestigious Sasol Wax Art Award is aimed at established, professional artists who are required to use this material as part of their process, medium or concept for their works. The award for 2007 went to Walter Oltmann for a metal cast installation, using the lost wax method. Choosing to title his work Unearthing, Oltmann observes that this 'underpins the notion of uncovering or bringing to light by digging, searching or discovery. It reflects the post-Apartheid era impulse to uncover our history. The hands with dowsing tools suggest practices associated with finding water and settlements as much as digging and mining; as a means of survival, as well as exploiting the land for its riches and also denying access and agency to others.'

The 2007 Sasol Wax Art Award exhibition also includes the work of finalists Wayne Barker, Usha Seejarim, Andrew Verster and Sue Williamson. Barker's investigations into the activities of bees have led to an installation that is, 'a discovery of the possibility of healing with nature and ultimately, the whole of society'. Sue Williamson's split screen video explores the secret world of waxing behind the beauty parlour door. A recreation of a bedroom and a bathroom in fragile wax paper, by Usha Seejarim, suggests a dream-like world and, our own transience as human beings, while Andrew Verster explores ritual and body markings in his powerful installation of suspended panels constructed from layers of tissue paper held together by wax.

Opens: December 5
Closes: March 9

Bester's capacity to work with found and rejected objects and scraps of metal, and to transform them into extraordinary sculptures filled with social and political meaning, has gained for him a national and international reputation. Added to this is his individualistic application of the medium of oil paint. His source of inspiration is his own environment and experience, but he succeeds in speaking to a bigger audience and in making his ideas and intentions universally applicable.

The exhibition comprises sculptures and paintings and offers a glimpse into Bester's early paintings of the 1980s, which have seldom been seen in public. Of particular interest is the series of portrait studies, specially created for the show and on permanent loan to the Montagu Museum. This exhibition offers the public a rare opportunity of seeing the evolution of Bester's work from its early beginnings through to the recent paintings and sculptures.

This exhibition is the result of collaboration between the Iziko South African National Gallery and the town of Montagu in the Western Cape, where Bester grew up. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with contributions from Professor Michael Godby and Professor Sandra Klopper.

Opens: December 5
Closes: April 13

After the Cubist revolution in art in 1907 and the proliferation of academic art schools, the genre of 'still life' painting, in South Africa as elsewhere, tended to lose the symbolic and moral meanings it had attained in 17th century Holland and 18th and 19th century France. It came to be associated primarily with the idea of representation. In a sense, still life now represents the idea of art itself, and artists in any medium are drawn to it to define themselves as artists. More recently, the very neutrality of the genre has presented opportunities for the introduction of new symbolic forms, especially from cultures that attach great significance to objects.

This exhibition, curated by Professor Michael Godby, combines examples of historical still life paintings from the Iziko Collections with a survey of South African still life painting, from its origins as an imitation of European practice to works from our own day. Stylistic trends that have been applied to the genre over the course of the 20th century are represented. Different methods that have been used to 'Africanize' still life are shown; highlighting works by a new generation of young artists who have appropriated the genre, not only to proclaim their identity as artists, but also to reinvest the subject with powerful new social meanings.

Opens: November 19
Closes: March 31

On the surface there is a wonderful playfulness in the choice of juxtaposing two bodies of work by two apparently incongruous artists: Sanell Aggenbach and Johann Louw. And the exhibition reveals two widely differing approaches to a familiar genre and medium - portrait painting. Louw's work, as could be clearly seen in his recent mid-career retrospective, places a definitive emphasis on the painterly surface. The artist eschews any purely cerebral interpretation of his work - the viewer is forced to engage with the visceral and tactile brushwork of his paintings. Aggenbach's conceptual playfulness is evident in her choice of positioning her paintings within a conceptual framework. The traditional painting formulae become 'props' for Aggenbach's interrogation of the genre.

Opens: February 2
Closes: February 27

Land artist Andy Goldsworthy has travelled to South Africa to oversee the installation of three of his pieces into the collection of the Swiss magnate Donald Hess, owner of Paarl winery Glen Carlou. Goldsworthy is a world famous environmental sculptor who explores and experiments with various natural materials such as leaves, stones, wood, sand, clay, ice and snow. The seasons and weather determine the materials and the subject matter of his projects. With no preconceived ideas of what he will create, he relies on what nature gives him. One piece Hard Earth was originally created by plastering the inside of a room with white clay which as it dried and cracked began to take on a vastly differently aspect. Hard Earth and other Goldsworthy pieces in the Hess collection will be going on show.

Alongside Goldsworthy, a key diasporan artist, Ouattara Watts, will also be showing work at Glen Carlou. Watts has been featured in a number of blockbuster shows including Okwui Enwenzor's 'The Short Century', 'Documenta' in 2000, the Whitney biennale and the Venice biennale. On display will be 11 of his paintings and watercolours from 1992 until 2006.

Opens: January 29