We were distraught to hear of the passing of Barend de Wet this past weekend. A full obituary is in the works, but in the interim here is an Archive Dive of some of ArtThrob’s coverage of Barend de Wet over the years.
RIP Barend, we’ll miss you. Thank you for your contribution to South African art.
Isabella Kuijers & Lloyd Pollak review Barend’s most recent exhibition ‘Black, White and Everything In-Between’ at SMAC Gallery.
That time David Bowie hung out with Kate Gottgens, Barend de Wet and Wayne Barker in Joburg.
Lloyd Pollak reviews Barend’s work in the group exhibition ‘Forged’.
He pops up in two installments of Art-Binge: Woodstock.
Chad Rossouw looks at Acting On Orders, a collaboration between de Wet, Christian Nerf and Doug Gimberg produced for an experimental and participatory art exhibition in New York entitled ‘Emergence’.
Tavish McIntosh writes about deWet’s take on a Museum of (Con)temporary Art, which at one point housed an archive of sorts called White Trash where businesses were encouraged to dump their rubbish in the space.
Ed Young and friends had a very long ‘conceptual’ braai at de Wet’s farmhouse.
ArtThrob profiled Barend’s infamous ‘Honey’s Tattoo Parlour’ residency at the ArtHeat Projectspace in 2007, dishing out tattoos at R100 a pop.
Karen Rolfes addresses the demolition of de Wet’s GOD sculpture near Plettenberg Bay by the municipal authorities in 2004. It seems the word ‘GOD’ was too much for the community to accept.
A review of ‘The Big Four’ at the Brendon Bell-Roberts Fine Art Gallery in 2000. Alongside de Wet, the exhibition featured Wayne Barker, Claire de Jong and Elmi Badenhorst.
That time Kathryn Smith attended an exhibition titled ‘Barend de Wet’ which didn’t involve the artist at all.
Barend de Wet was once the proprietor of a hotel in Observatory called Rooms.
Paul Edmunds reviews a performance by Peet Pienaar and Barend de Wet at Red Eye gallery in Durban.
In 1998, Pienaar and de Wet took to the streets with signs reading ‘DYSLEXICS OF THE WORLD UNTIE.’
The Peet Pienaar/Barend de Wet bromance riffed on Marcel Duchamp by playing Monopoly in a performance entitled Everything is Art. Pienaar wore a black tuxedo while de Wet was characteristically in the buff. [The images for this one seem to have gone AWOL #90sweb]
*BONUS*
The ArtHeat Projectspace page for Barend de Wet’s infamous ‘Honey’s Tattoo Parlour’ residency in 2007. If you look closely, you can spot decidedly leaner incarnations of both of ArtThrob’s editors in the project’s documentation.
