Archive: Issue No. 133, September 2008

7.09.08 'Jozi and the (M)other City' at Michaelis Galleries
7.09.08 Sam Nhlengethwa at Goodman Gallery Cape
7.09.08 Jan-Henri Booyens at Whatiftheworld / Gallery
7.09.08 Katherine Bull at blank projects
7.09.08 Virginia MacKenny at Irma Stern
7.09.08 Araminta de Clermont at Joã Ferreira
7.09.08 Georgina Gratrix at Whatiftheworld / Gallery
7.09.08 Nigel Mullins at Bell-Roberts
7.09.08 'New Comic Art' at Erdmann Contemporary
7.09.08 Max Wolpe, The League of Ahistoric Anachronistic Photographers
Specialising in Obsolete and Archaic Processes and 'Candy' at AVA
7.09.08 Niklas Witenberg at blank projects
7.09.08 Hanneke Benade at Everard Read Gallery
7.09.08 Gavin Goodman at João Ferreira
7.09.08 'Urban/Pop' at 34 Long

13.08.08 Bianca Baldi at blank projects
9.08.08 Berni Searle at Michael Stevenson
9.08.08 'Print 08' at Bell-Roberts
9.08.08 Youssef Nabil at Michael Stevenson
9.08.08 'Avhashoni Mainganye, Charles Maggs and Zelda Weber at AVA
9.08.08 'Decade' at Sanlam Art Gallery
9.08.08 'Some South African Voices' at Rose Korber

STELLENBOSCH

7.09.08 Collection 10' at SMAC

13.08.08 Kevin Brand at Sasol Art Museum
13.08.08 Rodin at the Rupert Museum

PAARL

10.02.08 Andy Goldsworthy and Ouattara Watts at Glen Carlou

'Jozi and the (M)other City' is a project curated by Carine Zaayman. It focuses on gaining a deeper understanding of Johannesburg and Cape Town through the production of artworks and writing, as well as providing a discussion forum online. A the heart of this project lies the dynamic, or perhaps even the dialectic, between myths and realities concerning these cities: JAMC seeks to interrogate the commonly held beliefs concerning both locales against more in-depth reflections on the way in which these cities came to be, and how they function today. It features the work of eight artists and two writers. They are Ralph Borland, Nicola Grobler, Stephen Hobbs, Svea Josephy, Marcus Neustetter, Sean O'Toole, Nathaniel Stern, Johan Thom, James Webb and Carine Zaayman.

Opens: September 8
Closes: September26

Sam Nhlengethwa explores a range of themes that encompass everyday urban life both in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent. Alternately sombre or playful, his works may focus on serious social, political and cultural commentary or on the sheer enjoyment of life. As a jazz devotee, Nhlengethwa draws much of his inspiration from music, which features prominently throughout an oeuvre noted for its strong sense of design, syncopated rhythm and luminosity of colour. Nhlengethwa was Standard Bank Young Artist Award Winner in 1994.

For this exhibition Nhlengethwa brings together his signature combination of collage and paint media to create impressive, large scale works that reflect on the social processes of art. Themed around opening nights, he makes tongue-in-cheek reference to the art world in arcane and witty fashion. The artist also continues his lithographic series of Tributes in which he pays homage to South Africa's most illustrious artists such as Dumile Feni, David Koloane and Marlene Dumas.

Opens: September 13
Closes: October 4

Jan-Henri Booyens' debut solo exhibition, 'The Matt Sparkle', comes to Cape Town after showing at The Premises Gallery in Johannesburg. The exhibition works are focused primarily on the study of non-objective idiosyncratic landscapes and are distinctly rendered on medium and large scale canvases. Booyens comments: 'I rely on intuition in my working process and in the act of painting itself, with the outcome seldom being predetermined.'

Booyens is originally from Durban and has exhibited on group shows and as part of Avant Car Guard on a national and international level since 2000.

Opens: October 2
Closes: November 1

Artist and printmaking lecturer at Stellenbosch University Katherine Bull explains of her new show: 'The main focus of "data capture: a muse" will be a series of live portrait drawing performances playing on the tradition of life drawing and the artist's search for a muse. This exhibition forms part of an ongoing series in which I am creating low-resolution portraits on the verge of recognition and explore the relationship between the real-time projected image that mirrors the drawing process and its output as print.
'This for me both re-focuses the emphasis onto the act of looking and drawing itself and plays with the different perspectives of the public performance as spectacle and the private moment between the artist and sitter. Through this process I continue to attempt to bring the physical and virtual into a closer dialogue. The contextual references reflected in my interrogation of the technology of drawing and print continue to include an alchemy of the art historical, the scientific and the medical in search of finding a position for the contemporary portrait as more than the sum of its parts; an exchange of energy rather than a mechanical process of representation.'

Opens: October 1
Closes: October 24

Virginia MacKenny's exhibition of paintings and etchings, 'Foam Along the Waterline', at the Irma Stern Museum engages the world of innocence lost in a time of ecological duress. Philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term 'solastalgia' to describe the effects of global warming on the mental wellbeing of Australians. Combining solacium (comfort) and algia (pain) 'solastalgia' describes 'a pining for a lost environment'. Akin to nostalgia, it reflects not on the pain felt having left a place, but the hurt experienced when one stays in a place and it irreparably changes around one.

In MacKenny's work the constraint of nature features, but always in an understated manner. Dominated by single colour fields the paintings provide a terrain where large and small events gain equal prominence. Quotidian objects such as a glass of water, Christmas trees, flowers and ice lollies are juxtaposed with images of a less settling nature including a wreck off the West Coast, a coelacanth from the British Natural History Museum, a Red Shift Survey image of the known universe and an aerial view of the disintegration of the ice shelf of the Bering Straits. Diagrammatic and illusionistic renderings combine in the work to generate spatial discontinuities that disrupt the expected comfort of familiar objects.

Mixing reverence, nostalgia, irony and a sense of wonder, the work encourages viewers to make their own connections and reflections on a planet changing irrevocably.

MacKenny, a Volkskas award winner and Ampersand recipient, has work in a number of public collections and is Senior Lecturer in Painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art.

Opens: 23 September
Closes: 11 October

Araminta de Clermont explains the origin of her photographic project as 'a documentation of a cultural phenomenon: the "chappies" of the notorious South African Numbers Gangs, the 26s, 27s and 28s. These prison tattoos are, I believe, works of art and culturally significant in their own right, being the preferred art-form of an especially disenfranchised and marginalised group. These are not designer tattoos. Rather, they are tattoos whose pigments are typically produced from ground up rubbish bins, batteries, or bricks. Each conveys a message (as with the gallows symbol, a mark that the wearer faced the death sentence), a gradation in the hierarchy of the Number, or sometimes a rather more personal statement or tribute.'

De Clermont will also exhibit in Berlin at artSPACE in September and will take part in a group show entitled 'Human Animal' at the Trustman Gallery in Boston later this year.

Opens: September 3
Closes: September 27

Georgina Gratrix presents her first solo offering, 'Master Copy'. Exploring the traditions, techniques and histories of painting, she flattens 'Old Masters', remixes classics and samples modernisms to explore just what painting means within contemporary popular culture. Taking her own position as a young female painter within the concept-driven contemporary art world, Gratrix plays with stereotypes of gender, youth and conceptualism - to make a teasing exhibition using media that range from oil paint to pencil crayon to mono print.

Opens: September 4
Closes: September 27

In 'Caveman Spaceman', Nigel Mullins' new show, he extends the ideas surrounding the transience of life that he began to explore in his previous show 'Earthlings' (2006). There, the predominant imagery was of bleak and endless landscapes inhabited by fleeting and rather manic beings. In 'Caveman Spaceman', however, Mullins introduces a cooler, more objective set of images. He turns his considerable painting facility to a photographic rendering of sights which, through over familiarity, we cease to see: satellite dishes on chimneys, flowers, semi-industrial landscapes. These become objects of contemplation.

In 1997 Mullins won the first prize at the Royal Overseas League 14th Annual Open Exhibition in London. This was followed by 'Continuum', his second one-man show in London. This show dealt with dislocation in a particularly South African context. He began the millennium as a nominee for the Daimler Chrysler Award for Contemporary South African Art 2000, and later in the year won a merit prize at the Absa L'Atelier 2000.

Opens: September 23
Closes: October 24

'New Comic Art' continues the tradition of Erdmann's comics exhibitions and will launch a few new artists in the Erdmann Gallery stable. These include Jacqui Stecher, Norman O'Flynn, Karlien de Villiers, Mxolisi Sapeta, Leonora van Staden and Daniel Popper. All these works will be brought together in a packed salon-style exhibition, which includes paintings, drawings and loads of new multiples.

The opening reception will also launch the second edition of Chris Ledochowski's popular book Cape Flats Details.

Opens: August 27
Closes: September 27

Max Wolpe presents 'Eccentrics' in the Main Gallery. This brings together several series on which he has worked over the years. These are linked by his extensive engagement with the themes of bohemia and alternative realities. His rendering of figures is often repetitive but also reminiscent of Ensor, Lowry and certain German Expressionists. Initially his work appears deceptively ingénue, but on closer inspection a wry humour and sardonic wit emerges and one is confronted by his satirical take on the parallel worlds of the hippy, the reveller, the 'cool cat' and the pseudo-intellectual. The result is acute social comment from the fringe. 'Eccentrics' comprises a range of works on paper, board and canvas showcasing the world and milieu of the eccentric drawn from many areas of life.

The League of Ahistoric Anachronistic Photographers Specialising in Obsolete and Archaic Processes exhibits in the Long Gallery. The collective comprises Jean Brundrit, Nicky Cooper, Vanessa Cowling, Svea Josephy and Adrienne van Eeden. This exhibition forms part of the group's ongoing research around the contemporary relevance and re-appropriation of labour-intensive early photographic processes, especially those that fall outside of mainstream silver-gelatin printing. The individual photographers' images not only share a time-consuming work methodology, but also thematic overlaps regarding broader concerns with identity, gender, sexuality and history.

Marlise Keith, Michael Taylor and Hannah Morris present 'Candy' in the Artstrip. This show explores a word that alludes to everything from society's yearning for sweet escape to the candy shop as a house for fugitives. The show explores through mark-making, painting, and collage on paper and board, an uninhibited investigation of candy, and the strangeness found in the consumption of something that is both very good, and very bad.

Opens: September 15
Closes: October 3

Niklas Wittenberg's work encompasses painting, drawing, objects and installation. Working within the Romantic tradition, he creates highly personal environments where a murky ambiguity is privileged over the bright clarity of day. Despite these Romantic preoccupations, the artist approaches the visual non sequitur with the energy of a snapshot. A delicate drawing might be shown alongside a found object he has crudely reworked, or photographs preoccupied with an airy take on dislocation. His approach can be claustrophobic, abstracted with self-absorption or erupting without warning into a muted sensuality. His unabashed lyricism - concerned with rapidly shifting contexts, disintegration and visual saturation - is as '21st-century as channel-surfing'.

Opens: September 4
Closes: September 26

Although chiefly known for her representations of women, in recent years Hanneke Benade has depicted both genders - variously in somber or pastel hues - posed against almost pungent, black backdrops. Although individualised, the works suggest the typology of a patriarchal heritage: austere clothing and hairstyles predominate. Contained and constrained, this imagery evokes a world in which the mundane is augmented and immortalised, harking back to the genre of 17th century still-life painting. Yet, Benade's manipulation of startling colour contrasts reinforces the tension between surface containment and an underlying sense of displacement. 'In time' develops this sense of displacement into an idiomatic portal leading to a mythical time and place of childhood. Comprising 12 large scale pastel works on cotton paper 'In time' depicts an iconography with which we, as adults, are vicariously familiar: a couple having tea with a miniature teaset sitting at a tiny table and small chairs; people playing hide-and-seek.

Benade was born in Tshwane in 1972. In 2003 she won the Brett Kebble Art Award in the category of Painting and Mixed Media.

Opens: September 18
Closes: October 1

Controversy and socio-political change always capture the human imagination. Inspired by the glossy, visually commanding style of fashion photography and pop-culture iconography, Gavin Goodman has created a body of photographs that is layered with contemporary and thought-provoking themes, without compromising on aesthetic impact. The images are definitely 'South African' - exploring issues like identity and the racial divide in our post-apartheid culture. It is artistic risk-taking to play with such historically significant concepts, but, the photographer's tongue-in-cheek approach brings a playful, questioning edge to the potentially contentious subject matter.

Goodman graduated from Afda film school with an honour's degree in the motion picture medium, specialising in cinematography. Goodman's photograph The Butcher earned him the gold in the professional category Beauty and Fashion in the Fujifilm Photographic Awards which were announced on Tuesday August 19, World Photography Day . The exhibition takes place at João Ferreira's old exhibition venue in Hout Street, just around the corner from the current premises.

Opens: September 4
Closes: September 25

Mass production, kitsch, comics and advertising have provided inspiration for Pop artists the world over ever since Andy Warhol. Simultaneously, Street art has developed into a multifaceted movement, flourishing on the nervous energy of graffiti and stencilling, spraycan art, skateboard culture, hip music and urban fashion. This exhibition explores the intersection of Pop and Street.

Often a form of dissent against control, Street art has, not surprisingly, been regarded as unlawful in most organised communities, travelling a difficult road into the world's art galleries. Recent controversy in Cape Town's press highlights the continuing opposition, mostly founded in ignorance, this art form faces. In comparison, Pop art had a smooth trip. London's Tate Modern staged the first major public museum display of Street art this year, featuring works by six internationally recognised artists on the museum's outside walls.

Blek le Rat started out stencilling rats all over the streets of Paris in the 1980s, and is acclaimed as a pioneer of contemporary street stencilling, a quick and easy way to reproduce images endlessly. Nick Walker is one of Britain's graffiti pioneers with a career spanning more than 20 years. He has adopted stencilling as a mode of treating iconic figures with wry humour in public places. D*face, a London-born artist, and Asha Zero from South Africa, are members of the younger generation of graffiti artists with growing international reputations. Surprise is a key ingredient of Street art, and in keeping with this element, the show will contain works by hot new local artists who remain incognito for the moment. A selection of skate decks with pop art images by Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, D*face, Norman Catherine and Asha Zero will be on exhibition. Roelof Louw, a seasoned Cape Town artist, presents new editioned silkscreen prints in which his graphic idiom is perfectly adapted to produce the emotionally confusing images for which he has become well known in London.

Opens: September 9
Closes: October 4

Bianca Baldi's new project plays with ideas of public affection, fantasy and the cinematic image - combining actors, Fiat Seicentos, complicity and hefty logistics to stage a Grand Romantic Gesture. This participatory project will develop with events during the month of September.

Opens: September 4
Closes: September 26

This will be Searle's fourth solo exhibition at Michael Stevenson, following 'Crush' in 2006, 'About to forget' in 2005, and 'Vapour' in 2004. As in all these previous shows, Searle's work draws on the particularities of her own cultural heritage, invoking the rituals and traditions that persist through generations and continue to bind communities together long after the circumstances of their genesis have passed or been forgotten. Yet the lyrical, abstracted nature of her visual imagery ensures that her work transcends the specific and extends to global themes such as belonging and displacement, nationalism and xenophobia.

Searle's latest video, Alibama, premiered at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London in May 2008 as part of the South African exhibition 'Home Lands - Land Marks'. It takes as its central motif the traditional and widely known Cape song, 'Daar Kom die Alibama', which is thought to refer to the sighting of the Confederate ship, the Alabama, in Table Bay in 1863. Footage of the sun setting over the harbour, accompanied by the singing of a Cape Malay choir, is disrupted as the camera pans over Robben Island and the noon gun fires its daily blast - powerful signifiers of time and place, both historical and contemporary. The film then shifts to a more intimate register, its soundtrack the artist teaching the song to her young son, who sings along until he falls asleep, while black streamers bleed colour into water surrounding a red paper boat.

Searle will also show other new work including Mute, where she responds emotively to the xenophobic violence wracking the country, and Spirit of '76, a work commissioned for an exhibition in Philadelphia in 2007 that, through its title, draws links between the signing of the US Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Soweto Uprising in 1976.

Since her solo show here in 2006, Searle has had survey exhibitions at Johannesburg Art Gallery (2006) and the Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida (2006), travelling to the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois (2007). She was one of three artists selected for the annual New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007). Her work has featured on numerous group exhibitions in the past year, including 'Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body' at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, USA; 'Apartheid: The South African Mirror' at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania, Barcelona; and 'Global Feminisms' at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Opens: September 4
Closes: October 11

'Print 08: Myth, Memory and the Archive' surveys current developments in South African printmaking vis-‡-vis the archive and its dramatically expanded significance in the digital age. The exhibition, featuring some 30 established and emerging printmakers, explores the redefined notion of the archive as a result of the computer and new ethics and attitudes regarding images and objects. In conjunction with the exhibition, a day of public discussions addressing the contemporary positioning of print will be presented at Bell-Roberts Gallery on August 15 in collaboration with the Michaelis School of Fine Art and the Visual Arts Department, Stellenbosch. Other complementary events include the on-site printing of a print-portfolio.

The Friends of the National Gallery will be hosting a walkabout with Fritha Langerman on August 21 at 11am. The cost is R20.

Opens: August 13
Closes: September 19

This is Youssef Nabil's second showing at Michael Stevenson, following 'Sleep in My Arms' in 2007. The exhibition will bring together hand-coloured photographs of celebrities and friends, self-portraits, and scenes staged over the past 15 years. Nabil was born in 1972 in Cairo where he studied literature and began producing his photographs while still living there. In this time he took many glamorous portraits of singers and stars such as Natacha Atlas, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssra and legendary belly-dancer Fifi Abdou. He later moved to Paris and New York, where he has continued to produce haunting self-portraits that reflect his dislocated life away from Egypt, as well as portraits of fellow artists, many of them from the Arab world, including Ghada Amer, Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Tracey Emin and Zaha Hadid.

In his photographs, his preoccupations with fame, sex, loneliness and death are immediately apparent. Many of the famous sitters are photographed asleep, in the realms of dreams and rest, far from their public personae. Or Nabil photographs them in a glamorous manner befitting their fame, often set against a pale blue background, his gentle hand-colouring removing the blemishes of reality. In his staged photographs he creates scenes that recall Arabic cinema of the 1950s where the heroes and stars act out the broken dreams of love, life and sex. Interspersed throughout the series are self-portraits in liminal spaces on the edge of consciousness where he is seemingly unaware of the presence of the camera.

Nabil's first collection of photographs was published by Autograph ABP, London, and Michael Stevenson in 2007. He was awarded the Seydou Keita Prize for portraiture at the 2003 Biennial of African Photography in Bamako, Mali. He has previous had solo exhibitions at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France, in 2003; the Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City, in 2001; and the Third Line Gallery in Dubai in 2007. His work has featured on numerous curated exhibitions including, in 2008, 'Far from Home' at the North Carolina Museum of Art; and, in 2006, 'Arabiske Blikke' at the GL Strand Museum in Copenhagen; 'Word into Art' at the British Museum, London; and 'Nineteen Views: Contemporary Arab Photography' at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporõneo, Seville, Spain.

Opens: September 4
Closes: October 11

Avhashoni Mainganye presents 'Journey' in the main gallery. Mainganye works as a photographer, painter, printmaker and sculptor. He studied at Rorke's Drift and after completing his course, returned to Venda where he helped establish the Venda Art Foundation, forerunner of Ditike, an organisation dedicated to assisting rural artists market their work. A previous participant in Thupelo workshops, he was awarded the Solly Weiner Bursary at UNISA in 1985 and was a finalist in the 2008 Sasol wax awards.

Charles Maggs completed his Master's in Fine Art at Michaelis in 2006 with distinction. Currently a senior Lecturer at AAA, Maggs exhibits 'Zombie' in the Long gallery. The title of the exhibtion comes from lyrics by Fela Kuti:
'Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go (Zombie)
Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop (Zombie)
Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn (Zombie)
Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think (Zombie)'

'Zombie' is a photographic and new media-based exhibition that negotiates fear and prejudice. Maggs distorts everyday media images rendering them in equal parts banal and horrific. 'Zombie' becomes a reflection of humanity, enmeshed in the 24 hour media machine.

The third component of the AVA's offering is work from Zelda Weber, a part-time lecturer at Ruth Prowse entitled 'Cut to Size'. Weber has created a series of etchings that explores stages of psychological and emotional human development.

Opens: August 25
Closes: September 12

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

Eight contemporary South African artists are featured in this exhibition, and Korber points out that despite the fact that there is no particular theme linking the works of these artists, nor is there a common style or medium that unites them, their works, in one way or another, emphasise their deep South African roots and commitment.

Included are Willie Bester, Paul du Toit, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Sam Nhlengethwa, Selwin Pekeur, Sophie Peters, ceramicist Yvette McGee and the Makhubele family, renowned for their fine examples of contemporary Tsonga-Shangaan beadwork. The variety of works to be seen here is proof of how dynamic and innovative the contemporary South African art scene has become.

'The new democratic circumstances of the mid 1990's,' writes art consultant, Gilfillan Scott-Berning, 'have allowed South Africans to acknowledge an individuality and to provide a new energy on a new stage, as it is not only the social, political and economic issues of apartheid that define us... The cultural isolation of the apartheid years has given way to the reality of social change and the real challenges and economics of everyday life'.

Opens: August 4
Closes: mid-September

'Collection 10' is a group exhibition showcasing previous and recent works by 20 contemporary artists selected by the gallery. Showcasing diverse artistic intentions and visual explorations, the exhibition presents Johann Louw, Sam Nhlengethwa, Kay Hassan, Anton Karstel, Wayne Barker, Beezy Bailey, Willie Bester, David Koloane, Peter Clarke, Arlene Amaler-Raviv, Philip Badenhorst, Ricky Burnett, Jake Aikman, Gail Catlin, Matthew Hindley, Elizabeth Gunter, André Naudé, Ndikumbule Ngqinambi and Francois van Reenen. SMAC also represents Italian artist Jonathan Guaitamacchi. The exhibition is designed to give new insights into current trends.

Opens: September 18
Closes: October 31

After a successful showing in Pretoria, the works of winner Kevin Brand and fellow nominees for the 2008 Mercedes-Benz South Africa Award for Art Projects in Public Spaces comes to Stellenbosch. Brand scooped the 2008 Award earlier this year. Brand's work is distinguished by his use of non-traditional sculptural materials to make strong but increasingly nuanced comments on aspects of South African social history and life. His particular interest is to make work that is accessible to the larger community, and locate it in a public arena.

In their judging of the 2008 Arts Award, the jury panel said that Brand was named winner, because his engagement with historical events is both personal and political. 'In referencing historical events, Brand is able through materiality, scale and process to capture public imagination - for example, in the "Fault Lines" Exhibition at the Cape Town Castle where he recreated on a wall Sam Nzima's iconic image of Hector Pieterson. Working outside of convention, Brand's production is brave and is not restricted to rules and boundaries that often come with commissions,' said jury member Bongi Matlau, on behalf of the adjudication panel.

Brand won a cash prize and, together with the other seven finalists, has exhibited his work in Pretoria, and now in Stellenbosch. Later this year the exhibition will move to Berlin. A catalogue has been published featuring the eight finalists and showcasing their work, with the largest section dedicated to Brand. Other nominees are Marco Cianfanelli, Jane du Rand, Strijdom van der Merwe, Vincent Baloyi, Jan Jordaan and Usha Seejarim.

Opens: August 6

South Africans will have the rare opportunity to view 26 bronze sculptures by legendary French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. The bronzes will be exhibited at the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch and include famous works such as The Thinker, The Kiss and The Cathedral. At the height of his career, Rodin was regarded as the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo. Straying from 19th Century academic conventions, Rodin created his own sense of personal artistic expression that focused on the vitality of the human spirit. His modelling techniques captured the movement and depth of emotion of his subjects by altering traditional poses and gestures. His pioneering work has been a critical link between traditional and modern figurative sculpture.

Rodin had a profound influence on 20th Century sculpture. He refused to ignore the negative aspects of humanity, and his works confront distress and moral weakness as well as passion and beauty.

Opens: August 21

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