CAPE TOWN

Contemporary art theory has it that the concept of a piece is more important than its execution or presentation. The idea is the thing, and of these, Veronique Malherbe has plenty, many somewhat provocative. On 'The Quest for Zero Defect', these provocations centre around her own experience of being inseminated, giving birth, breastfeeding, becoming a mother. Bodily fluids play an important part in her concepts: in a radio interview, she describes how lying in bed feeding baby Ariel one night, she suddenly imagined making chocolates with her own breast milk. Sex and chocolate, linked. A sort of Mae West approach to art-making.

The artistic result of this inspiration is not the "Breastlay" imprinted slab which was a graphic collaboration with web designer Merlyn Meredith, but some slightly crumbly looking chocolates in conventional heart and round shapes, presented in a small wooden confectioner's display case. A limited edition. Seldom can chocolates have provoked such a mixture of emotions, such interest. Reuters and Associated Press have been on the line; one woman phoned Malherbe's house and asked if she could order the chocolates in bulk. But the piece goes a long way beyond providing a quick media sensation: the precious but forgotten memory of imbibing his mother's breast milk is believed to live deep inside every male. In using her own milk to manufacture her chocolates, Malherbe has shown how extraordinarily potent the ordinary-appearing can be.

Sperm Halo induces something of the same emotional cocktail. Suspended under rings of neon light are 100 test tubes of sperm, each labelled with the donor's name. Although one or two donors have gone creative and added a bit of glitter or green colouring to their contribution, a first sensation on seeing all the test tubes side by side (apart from a slight queasiness at being so close to this much sperm) is to note how identical the colour of each is. Which is interesting, considering the enormous variety of children - "enough to populate the whole of Africa", says Malherbe - who could potentially have been fathered by the contents. The piece is accompanied by photographs of the male collaborators, selected by Malherbe on a referral system on the basis of creativity, and is seen by the artist as a celebration of human potential.

Then there is Mobile Madonnas. Malherbe invited women living on the streets to accompany her to a portrait photographer located in Cape Town station to be photographed with their children. She presented these portraits to the women in exchange for being allowed to display one copy as part of her exhibition. There they hang in an inwardly facing ring, best viewed from a seat on a steel roundabout (constructed by artist Anzu Phillips) on the floor below. The roundabout, whizzing around on opening night, might be seen as a metaphor for the difficult life of these women, trapped in a spiral of inescapable poverty. Also, although the women came away from the experience with a family photograph they would never have otherwise acquired, there is a faint whiff of the colonial about the piece, the have-nots being photographed by the have.

These are just three of the pieces. There is also Preserving Purity, first shown on last year's 'Bringing Up Baby' exhibition, and consisting of 600 photo-booth pictures documenting her discovery of becoming pregnant, the birth of her child and the first years of his life. These, along with text, are suspended from a steel spiral providing a curved walkway for viewers.

And there's more - collaborative jewellery, graphics, a piece called All This Useless Beauty. Go and see the show. The presentation is sometimes a bit tacky but the ideas, fecund and stimulating, occasionally brilliant, are there.

Until May 29. João Ferreira Fine Art, 80 Hout Street. Phone (021) 423-5403; fax 423-2136; e-mail joao@iafrica.com. Gallery hours: Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 5pm; Saturdays, 10am to 2pm; Sundays by appointment.

By Paul Edmunds

The first ever black-curated exhibition at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town is currently on view, part of an ongoing project organised by the SANG, the Robben Island Museum and Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia. 'Isintu - Ceremony, Identity and Community', explores ideas around the notion of 'blackness'. This contested and difficult term, which has carefully been chosen by its co-curators Tumelo Mosaka and Zayd Minty, is used to identify with different cultural experiences which have come to be categorised as 'black'. Issues of marginalisation, disempowerment, identity and representation are brought under scrutiny and used to generate dialogue between indigenous Australians and black South Africans.

The participating artists were able to workshop the issues together last year, a process which all apparently found dynamic and stimulating. Exhibiting artists from Australia include Destiny Deacon, Julie Dowling, Fiona Foley, Bronwyn Bancroft, and Ormay Nangala Gallagher, and, from South Africa, Berni Searle and Sandile Zulu.

Extended review in April ArtThrob. Reader's comment in Feedback.

South African National Gallery, Government Avenue. Phone: (021) 45-1628. Gallery hours: Tuesdays to Sundays, 10am to 5pm. Website: www.museums.org.za/sang/.

Brenda Atkinson is guest writer for Gauteng

Diane Victor and Thea Soggot at the Goodman

Uber-draftsman Diane Victor takes up most of the physical and emotional space on this exhibition. Walking into her world of wounded women and traitorous men, her gallery of caricatures and grotesques, you feel as if the flaps of skin that peel off her pastel bodies are your own.

Victor (her name is suddenly ironic, given the raw masochism of her works) doesn't pull any punches here: she works her material, composition and colour to maximise the discomfort of the viewer. The subject matter of her drawings and prints moves from the intimacies of sexual jealousy and conflict, to more broadly political themes around the collapse of Afrikaner Nationalism's self-deluded architecture, and the pathologies of urban crime.

In the former mental and aesthetic space, Victor is both ruthless and raw, a flagellated love-doctor looking for the heart of her lover. In the huge pastel drawing titled The Anatomy Lesson, Victor's reclining, naked body presides in mute but articulate pain over a couple entwined in the foreground of the field: the three are lying together on a white sheet spread on top of a lurid orange-yellow carpet. The dark-haired woman beneath the man, her own head slightly wounded, reaches her hand over his shoulder to dig into his back, which is split open, skin folded back to reveal the musculature of the spinal column. On his dorsal and lateral muscles are a multitude of words: "BETRAY BAIT FRAUD DENOUNCE TRAITOR INFORMER ABUSER CRITIC", and so on. The Victor-figure stares at the viewer head-on: red-rimmed eyes, resignation, rage, and a fire-extinguisher lying at her side.

For me, Victor's saturated, high-contrast prints are far more conceptually and visually compelling than her fleshy pastels. Big Bad Bed, for example, is a gorgeous, dark, disturbing work in which a woman and her obscured partner lie in a huge four-poster bed. The bed-posts coil to great heights and terminate in turreted cathedrals. Above the couple a dark angel curves his body in the sky, against the figure of what looks like a coelacanth - not inked but pressed into the flesh of the white paper. This angel's head and upper body are bondaged, his body is naked, his feet are bandaged. All around, sperm rains down in soft, muted spheres pressed into the paper.

As one visitor observed (presumably of Victor's work), this was not her "cup of tea". Victor's is a stronger brew of sado-masochism than we are perhaps used to in this medium, and her drawing capabilities are used in the service of a merciless look at human folly. Most often, what she finds is ugly.

Thea Soggot's 'Mud Drawings', in the wings of the gallery, are a soft counterpoint to Victor's onslaught. The works consist basically of different series of heads and torsos "painted" onto thick paper with mud, and arranged in minimalist grids.

In her Head series, seven gridded, abstract paintings of a head - figured from different angles, but never full-on - are arranged with two "drip pages", such that the mud of two of the heads drips onto the blank square of white paper below. Colour shifts from soft and warm to intense in the Torso series - here a glowing torso emerges from a pitch black field. Each torso is differentiated by changing shadows and light, all are without arms, and some begin to drip towards the bottom of the canvas, suddenly seeming to lose their bold assertiveness to the uncertainties of the medium.

These are beautiful figurative studies - poignant and perplexing, suggestive of the frailties that reside in the lineaments and physical fields of the human bodies.

Show closes May 8. Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood. Gallery hours: Tuesday to Friday, 9.30am to 5.30pm; Saturday, 9.30am to 4pm. Phone (011) 788-1113; fax: 788-9887; e-mail goodman@iafrica.com. Website: www.goodman-gallery.com.

Wits graduate Joni Brenner, who has recently returned from a year's studio residency in Paris, has installed a remarkable exhibition at the Sandton Civic. Expertly mounted and brilliantly installed, 'Off the Wall' is an exhibition fascinated with medium and frame. The works - which explore media from sculpture to oil to watercolour - are all lovingly subversive of portraiture, and move from moments of fragile intimacy to monumental exclamations alienating in their scale and abstraction. As the exhibition title suggests, Brenner is interested in moving two-dimensional work off the wall, and in setting three-dimensional work against it.

She begins with two playfully tactile pieces inspired by postcard images of Rodin's La Pensée. In the one work, Chip Off the Old Block, Brenner installs one of the postcards beside a sculpted "chip" which masquerades as a beautiful discarded bit of Rodin's famous sculptural portrait. Both elements are mounted on a slate grey shelf. In the other work, Recollect - Reconnect, a postcard photograph of the same work (but from a different angle) sits on a similar shelf beside two small, sensuously thick abstract oil-on-canvas paintings. The oil colours are softly swishing pastels reminiscent of Penny Siopis's cake-like surfaces, suggestive of a medium in love with its own possibility.

These works are set off from the main gallery, a high-ceilinged, vaulted space which is brilliantly used to maximise the monumental scale of its contents - intensely soft, monochromatic watercolours mounted in huge, pastel-hued box frames. The centre-piece, which cuts the space diagonally, is titled Irresolute: Wall-painting. Originally a watercolour which Brenner has photocopied, enlarged to an enormous scale, and worked with wax, acrylic, and watercolour again, it is more facial impression than portrait, a shroud-like imprint that crumbles and paradoxically asserts itself through its imposing installation upon a huge podium.

The contrast between this and the preceding work is unsettling, which it is meant to be. It is challenging in terms of both space and medium. But it is also oddly disappointing: Brenner's expert manipulation of framing conventions detracts from the two-dimensional aspect of her work. Or maybe it adds to it. Caught in the grandeur of the presentation, the viewer is uncertain about the paintings - are they that good? Are they really interesting? Or are they competent postgraduate work made seductive by pretty frames?

The question of Brenner's talent is redeemed in the third "section" of the exhibition - a dark room in which sculptures are installed like jewels, in which thickly sensuous, darkly aggressive oils are butchly boxed and teasingly titled. These works break the clinical blandness of the main gallery, drawing us into Brenner's intimate, layered process once again. It is in this intimacy, within this manageable scale, that Brenner's work works best.

Closing May 29. Sandton Civic Gallery, corner West Street and Rivonia Road. Phone (011) 881- 6431.

Given the returns and amnesias that mark the uneven course of South African art history, it is a privilege to be able to view a cohesive representation of work by an artist who was such a vital part of this country's artistic production during the apartheid era. 'Remembering Legae' - the Goodman Gallery's homage to this influential artist - is a timeous and moving exhibition which traces Legae's work from the 1960s to the present, and includes drawings which have never been seen before.

Legae's drawings, both old and recent, are remarkable political statements of astounding power and delicacy. Chicken, one of his famous works made after the death of Steve Biko, communicates its way around the dangers of overt political protest - its fine lines depict an abstract creature, half-human, half-animal, an innocent spirit in the painful throes of departing from this world. Produced in a political climate in which blatant statements would have been dangerous, Chicken, for all its covertness, is a profound piece of political work.

The gallery has also managed to locate works from Legae's 1982 Freedom is Dead series, which he was only able to exhibit in Chile under a different title after censorious intervention by the South African government. In these pencil-on-paper drawings, Legae again harnesses human and animal forms together to create powerful visual allegories of mutilation and decay - twisted Goliaths have huge sad eyes above long beaks that drop pendulously from their faces. In The Beast, a human body defined more by the space around it than by its own form is draped over a mutant carcass.

The drawings on show for the first time - which Legae had held back with the intention of exhibiting them with work by Cecil Skotnes - are exquisitely fine experiments in form and metaphor, and challenge the title given to Dumile as "South Africa's Goya". Legae's early bronze sculptures are also powerful, magnificently restrained fusions of white Western and African aesthetic traditions. This is an exhibition that must be seen.

Closes June 5. Goodman Gallery, 163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood. Gallery hours: Tuesday to Friday, 9.30am to 5.30pm; Saturday, 9.30am to 4pm. Phone (011) 788-1113; fax: 788-9887; e-mail goodman@iafrica.com. Website: www.goodman-gallery.com.

Living out of a suitcase

'Daily Life in a Suitcase', a multi-media installation currently showing at the African Window Museum, is the culmination of a 10-year project by Dutch graphic designer Lieke Grob. Taking on trust the co-operation and collaboration of two complete strangers, Grob sent two small wooden suitcases to Rev Nico Smith in Pretoria, requesting that they be passed on to women in or near Pretoria. That was 1989. Each suitcase contained a camera, an empty notebook, a set of pencils, and the story of Grob's own life in Holland. Grob's request was that each woman fill the suitcase with pictures and her own life story. Who the women were and how they responded to this challenge may be discovered at the Museum.

Until June. African Window Museum, Visagie Street, Pretoria. Phone (012) 324-6082.

Trained at Funda Community College and Pelmama Academy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nhlanhla Mbatha has had work on a number of group shows in recent years, but it was 'Documents of Gondwanaland' - his first solo exhibition at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery in 1997 - that pushed him into local public consciousness.

Mbatha's powerful abstract earth-on-canvas "paintings" on Gondwanaland were a fresh and layered take on local art history, as well as a theory of landscape forged through continual movement, and punctuated by catastrophe. The legacy of Modernism's atelier found an unsettled locale in Mbatha's "studio", a cracked and empty swimming pool.

'Experience and Time' is Mbatha's second solo show. Still working with earth - this time mostly in the guise of camouflage - he continues to explore notions of place and displacement with a profoundly aesthetic formal eye.

Ends May 8. Millennium Gallery, 75 George Storrar Drive, Groenkloof, Pretoria. Phone (012) 46-8217.

This long-awaited exhibition - featuring more than 250 exhibits on the life and work of the Renaissance period's cultural mega-icon - has been collated and curated with professionalism and a thorough knowledge of Da Vinci's work. Unfortunately, while the R2-million revamp of the museum has enabled a slick and broadly informative exhibition that is attracting wide public interest in an unprecedented way, much of that knowledge doesn't come through.

There are two halls of facsimiles of mechanical and biological drawings done by the "scientist and inventor", as well as modern replicas of some of his models. Tour guides and touch-sensitive interactive computer terminals lead visitors through these halls, providing basic info-bytes on the cultural and political climate of the Renaissance, as well as on the groundbreaking nature of Da Vinci's many "inventions" (which would come to form the basis of wrist watches, motor cars and aeroplanes). The third hall is reserved for contemplation of Da Vinci's purely artistic production, again mostly in the form of exquisite facsimiles of drawings, but including a wall of oil paintings by his followers, among which is an original Raphael.

Despite the magnitude of the show's form and the diversity of its content, I suspect that anyone who knows a bit about art will feel disappointed by what is for all intents and purposes an educational exhibit pitched at schools and the art illiterate public. There is no sense of who Da Vinci was beyond his product, and at times the information provided is blatantly inaccurate (Da Vinci was not, for example, deeply misunderstood and marginalised in his own time). Impressive and gorgeous as the facsimiles are, there's a bit of a text-book feel to it all, as if pages of school books had been cut out and framed.

This is, perhaps, ungracious nit-picking: the exhibition achieves what it sets out to do, which is to educate about a prolific and influential, often radical artistic producer within the context of Renaissance ideology. It is a privilege to host an exhibition that has been seen by millions of visitors worldwide, and it is a privilege to have to queue with hundreds of people in order to get in. That, indeed, is a first.

Ends August 1. Pretoria Art Museum, corner Schoeman and Wessels Streets, Arcadia, Pretoria. Website: www.leonardo.co.za.

There's a small explosion of graphic art sizzling in South Africa at the moment: Durban cult 'zine iJusi has made it into the listings of UK-based graphic design bible Creative Review; the surf city's finest have launched another cultzine called Mamba; RAU's Gencor Gallery is currently hosting a festival of French, Belgian, and South African comic strips; and now there's 'Bitterkomix', an exhibition of orginal artworks and silkscreens by the maverick makers of the sour-poes satire that makes up the comic of the same name.

'Bitterkomix' features work by Joe Dog, Conrad Botes and Lorcan White, who propelled the comic to local notoriety with a bitter satirical cocktail that took the piss out of all manner of South African folly, from porn to apartheid to political correctness.

The show is a rewarding collection of visually potent works that range from the sinister to the lyrical, to the in-your-face baaaad. Of course this genre of work relies on the use of the straw men it shoots into flames, making the boundary between satire and, say, misogyny, a little blurry at times. If you can handle the disruption of your political comfort zones, you'll love this. And if you can't, you'll like it a lot anyway.

Ends June 7. The Open Window Contemporary Art Gallery, Pretoria.

'Collaborations' at the NSA

Nine poets and nine visual artists have worked together to produce 'Collaborations', currently running at the NSA Gallery, although four of the nine - Liz Vels, Charl Fregona, Johan Horn and Vinoo Nydoo - appear as both artists and poets. Until the middle of May.

NSA Gallery, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood, Durban. Phone (031) 22-2293; fax 22-3744. Gallery hours: Tuesday to Friday, 10am to 5pm.