Archive: Issue No. 137, January 2009

27.01.09 Four at 34 Long
17.12.08 Twenty Artists/Twenty Portraits at UCA Gallery
10.12.08 Big Wednesday at Whatiftheworld / Gallery
24.01.09 Deborah Bell at Goodman Gallery Cape

15.01.09 Pieter Hugo at Michael Stevenson
15.01.09 Conrad Botes at Michael Stevenson
11.12.08 William Kentridge at Goodman Gallery Cape
11.12.08 William Kentridge at Iziko SANG
08.12.08 'Home is my Castle' at Erdmann Contemporary
04.12.08 Adrian Kohler at 34 Long

27.11.08 'Bad form' at blank projects
12.11.08 Andrew Verster at Iziko SANG

The mix of artists on 34 Long's current show, 'Four', has proved popular and so its run has been extended, with some exciting additions. Several works - among them some by Robert Hodgins, D*Face and Willie Bester - have left the gallery, and have been replaced with new ones. A new work by Marlene Dumas has been added as well as a limited number of editioned prints by Takashi Murakami. If these passed you by last year, be sure not to miss them now.

Opens: January 27
Closes: March 7

'Twenty Artists/Twenty Portraits' at Robin Jones' UCA Gallery in Observatory showcases work by both established and emerging local artists. The works range from traditional to more conceptual approaches to the genre across a range of media.

While some of the portraits are of potentially recognisable, yet probably unknown, individuals, the identities of the subjects in many of the other works have remained deliberately obscured or secondary to metaphorical emphasis and societal commentary. Gabrielle Raaff's delicate, lyrical watercolour portraits and the veiled and blindfolded figures in Christopher Slack's work are of particular interest in this regard.

Other artists taking part include Norman O'Flynn, Jacqui Stecher, Wonder, Rebecca Townsend, Varenka Paschke, Alison Tu, Amanda Youngleson, Andre Serfontein, Carly Tanur, Albert Coertse, Liza Grobler, Desrae Saacks, Gary Stevens and Christian Toujours. Work by students from Julia Teale's Spencer Street Studios in Salt River will also be on show.

Opens: December 17
Closes: January 24

Whatiftheworld / Gallery presents a major group exhibition entitled 'Big Wednesday', the first in a series of annual summer group shows. This year's exhibition is co-curated by Julia Rosa Clark and Daniel Levi, and features a collection of new works by both resident and associated artists.

The gallery's stable includes up-and-coming young painter Andrzej Nowicki (now based in New York), who will be submitting a series of new watercolours and works on paper in his signature style. Matthew Hindley has recently returned from a successful three-month residency in Berlin, and will be showing a selection of new large scale oil paintings. Michaelis Prize winner Rowan Smith will be submitting two new works. In collaboration with Brodie/Stevenson in Johannesburg, Athi-Patra Ruga will be exhibiting selected works from his recent solo exhibition 'ÔøΩ of bugchasers and watussi faghags'.

Other participating artists include: Absa L'Atelier Winner James Webb, Zander Blom, new paintings by Tom Culberg as well as a new work by Dan Halter. Also expect to see selected works by Avant Car Guard, Stuart Bird, Linda Stupart, Liam Lynch, Georgina Gratrix and others.

Opens: December 10
Closes: January 24

In this new body of work enitled 'Flux', Deborah Bell continues exploring her art-making process in relation to her life's journey. Using references to mythology and archetypes, she draws on what Achille Mbembe has referred to as 'a multiplicity of universes', which includes the figurative art of Benin, Egypt, China and Babylonia, amongst other worlds.

Bell's interests range from the history of development in the imagery and iconography of spiritual beliefs, to writings on trans-substantiation, social change and cultural exchange. She sees the artist making images as a metaphor for the notion of 'drawing our worlds into being'. Her research drawings made in museums and from the study of visual history culminate in works which operate on a continuum of illusion and reality, seeking to bridge visible and invisible worlds.

The artist often cites Songlines by Bruce Chatwin as an inspiration and evokes a subconscious, pre-linguistic experience of the world. Revisiting ancient cultures, her muti-layered images suggest a shared history and a common ancestry.

'Flux' consists of both large and small scale bronzes, mixed media paintings on paper, and etchings, exploring transformation through process and material. Making reference to alchemy, creativity and dreaming, they celebrate the capacity to draw re-invented worlds into being, and examine archetypes including the journey, the chariot, the horse and rider, the chimera, and the oracle.

Bell was born in Johannesburg in 1957 and received her Master's in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand. She is represented in major museums and public collections in the US, the UK, Japan and South Africa. Public sculptures have been commissioned by, amongst others, Standard Bank and Wits Business School.

Opens: January 24
Closes: February 21

In the Nollywood series, Pieter Hugo explores the multi-layered reality of the Nigerian film industry. Photographs from the series were included on 'Disguise: The art of attracting and deflecting attention' at Michael Stevenson in May 2008. Hugo has subsequently returned to Nigeria to extend and deepen this body of work, and the series will be published in book form by Prestel in October 2009.

Nollywood is the third largest film industry in the world, releasing between 500 and 1 000 movies each year. It produces movies on its own terms, telling stories that appeal to and reflect the lives of its public: it is a rare instance of self-representation in Africa. The continent has a rich tradition of story-telling that has been expressed abundantly through oral and written fiction, but has never been conveyed through the mass media before. Stars are local actors; plots confront the public with familiar situations of romance, comedy, witchcraft, bribery and prostitution. The narrative is overdramatic, deprived of happy endings, tragic. The aesthetic is loud, violent, excessive; nothing is said, everything is shouted.

In his travels through West Africa, Hugo became increasingly intrigued by this hyperactive industry, in constant production. He compiled a list of the iconic images and scenes that had attracted his attention, and imagined photographing in these settings. Initial attempts to photograph on actual film sets however failed, in Hugo's mind, to capture the intensity of the situations. He decided to take his interpretation of these staged realities into another realm by assembling a team of actors and assistants. He asked them to recreate the stereotypical myths and symbols that characterise Nollywood productions, reproducing the dynamic of movie sets.

In 2008 Hugo was the winner of the KLM Paul Huf Award and the Arles Discovery Award at the Rencontres d'Arles Photography Festival in France. He had solo exhibitions at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool and Ffotogallery in Penarth, Wales. Group shows in 2008 included 'Street & Studio: An urban history of photography' at Tate Modern, London, and 'Make Art/Stop Aids' at the Fowler Museum, UCLA. Hugo was the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art in 2007.

Opens: January 15
Closes: February 21

Conrad Botes' exhibition, titled 'Cain and Abel', is a reflection on the origins of violence, a return to the very first tale of murder as related in the Bible and Qu'ran, as if to grapple with the notion of aggression itself. The story was translated into a gritty black and white comic published in Bitterkomix #15, a detailed allegory of rivalry, jealousy, corruption and lust which forms the point of departure for many of the works on this show.

The comic strip 'Cain and Abel' is reworked here as a series of reverse-glass painted panels, a medium that Botes has made distinctively his own, translating the graphic immediacy of his drawing into paint. In Crime and Punishment and Cain's Lament, horned male figures, their bodies inscribed with symbols, are seen to worship lofty female figures, but the impulse is less one of veneration than covetousness and the desire to possess. Large-scale landscapes form the backdrop for the archetypal figures of two men fighting, and a series of generic portraits of men is entitled Hostile Territory. There is a pervasive atmosphere of violence, horror, grit, a feeling the artist describes as 'like shrapnel under the skin'.

Botes is the co-founder and editor, with Anton Kannemeyer, of Bitterkomix, issue #15 of which was published in 2008. He participated in the third Guangzhou Triennial, China, in 2008; other recent group exhibitions include 'Apartheid: The South African Mirror' at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2007); 'Africa Comics' at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2007); 'Turbulence' at Hangar-7 in Salzburg, Austria (2007); and the ninth Havana Biennale, Cuba (2006).

Opens: January 15
Closes: February 21

In his first solo exhibition in Cape Town since his celebrated retrospective at Iziko South African National Gallery in 2002, William Kentridge shows a new body of projections, sculptures, drawings and prints at Goodman Gallery Cape. Commissioned to produce a new video for the fire screen of Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Kentridge has developed an extraordinary method of drawing in three dimensions where the image, once set in motion, coalesces into sculptural form.

Kentridge has been hailed as 'one of the most compelling interdisciplinary artists of our time' by Dan Cameron, former Chief Curator of the New Museum in New York. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1955, Kentridge has sought, through his films, drawings, sculptures, graphics and music, theatre and opera projects, to come to terms with the fragmented and fractured nature of his home town and country and with broader global divisions.'

Future exhibitions include a solo show opening at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and touring to MoMA, New York amongst other museums.

Kentridge's three new projections, Breathe, Dissolve and Return, premiered at Teatro La Fenice in Venice on November 27 before being seen at Goodman Gallery Cape in December. His production of Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse is currently touring Italy and France. Kentridge has been included by the Director and Curator, Dan Cameron, in the inaugural biennale of Prospect.1 New Orleans, running until January 18, 2009.

Opens: December 11
Closes: January 24

William Kentridge's multi-channel projected work entitled I am not me, the horse is not mine is on view at Iziko South African National Gallery. Based on the short story, 'The Nose' (1837) by Nikolai Gogol, and part of the process of developing Kentridge's production of Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose, commissioned for the Metropolitan Opera in 2010, it was first presented to international acclaim at the Biennale of Sydney in June this year.

The work stems from Kentridge's ongoing interest in the roots and trajectory of modernism: a mixture of the absurd, the self-reflective (and the 'self-divided') and the forms of fragmentation that one associates with modernism, its crushing in Russia in the 1930s and the long-term trajectory of the terrors of hierarchy.

Opens: December 11
Closes: March 8

This end-of-year exhibition is now an annual institution at Erdmann Contemporary, in 2008 entitled 'Home is my Castle'. This mixed media group exhibition includes works by KwaZulu-Natal-based artists Bronwen Vaughan-Evans, Themba Shibase, Nontobeko Ntombela and Angela Buckland. The exhibition also introduces work by Johannesburg-based artists Collen Maswanganyi and Diek Grobler. Acclaimed photographer Jurgen Schadeberg, now living and working between France and South Africa, will be represented on the exhibition by previously unseen works.

Opens: December 8
Closes: January 31

Adrian Köhler is one of Cape Town’s upcoming generation of sculptors. His second solo show at 34Long Fine Art presents his continuing exploration into transformations of meaning that accompany transformations of material.

His straight-faced skill in painstaking reproduction destabilizes apparent meaning in subtle ways, drawing the viewer into existential questions about what is valued, what is displayed, what is used. So for example, a hammer drill and a model aeroplane engine presented in exploded view, technical manual style, expose embedded concepts of masculinity. A meticulously reproduced chipboard Ming vase, complete with ashes, brings value systems to mind; and everyday objects like firewood, matchsticks and a pencil, carved with careful attention and consummate skill, are elevated from the mundane to the sublime.

Köhler offers no conclusions, only questions that grow more penetrating the more one searches for answers.

Köhler, previously a model-maker for film and advertising (the industries of fakery and deception), now produces art full-time.

Opens: December 2
Closes: January 24

'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

'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