Current Review(s)
're.collections'
Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky at Goodman Galleryrosenclaire: A Subtle Pairing
Twenty-five years ago, Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky left South Africa for Italy, where they established an art teaching programme in Tuscany that has become the stuff of legend. In a recent Goodman Gallery Cape exhibition entitled ‘Re-collections’, their first show in their country of origin since that time, the duo present a body of new work that draws upon that decade-and-a-half’s teaching, learning, living and most of all engaging with art.
Although they have, since the fall of apartheid, spent several months a year in South Africa, their work has remained comparatively unknown in this country. One notable exception is their Soap Boxes outside the Iziko South African National Gallery, which has become one of the best-loved works in that institution’s collection and the site of many artistic interventions, fully in keeping with its creators’ intentions. I suspect that until this exhibition the few locals who knew of rosenclaire thought of them chiefly as facilitators and educationalists, but ‘Re-collections’ is bound to change those perceptions.
18 February 2010 - 13 March 2010
Listings(s)
're.collections'
Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky at Goodman GalleryGoodman Gallery Cape presents the first solo exhibition by rosenclaire in South Africa for over twenty years. Working under the name rosenclaire, Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky present a conversation between their respective and collective practices and identities in 're.collections'.
The show’s title refers to a collection of arbitrary objects and thoughts waiting to be re-ordered, renamed and remembered. A cross-pollination between the flea-market, the studio, art history and personal experience, the show is a juxtaposition of painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. rosenclaire refer to their work as context-specific, governed by implicit signification where the subject matter defines the choice of media and stylistic convention. 're.collections' implies a reference to collections, collecting, correcting, naming and renaming, and the reframing of cultural constructs of art and artifice.
18 February 2010 - 13 March 2010
'Colour Theory'
Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky at Goodman GalleryGoodman Gallery Cape Town is pleased to present, for our first show of 2014, an exhibition of new works by rosenclaire titled 'Colour Theory'. The exhibition will feature a characteristic mix of collaborative and individual works by Claire Gavronsky and Rose Shakinovsky, presented in conversation.
The exhibition takes its title from a desire on the part of the artists to open up a discursive space between theoretical engagement and visceral response, between contemplation and surprise. Colour Theory can be understood in a social and political context, referring to racial categorisation and discrimination, as well as the ways in which we have been trained to “read” colour culturally. But colour, and our relationship with it, also exists in a place outside of these linguistic and cultural constructs. As the artists write: 'Colour… has a voice and impact of its own, directly on the senses and emotions. It resonates in the silence when language reaches its limits, when words fail in the face of overwhelming joy, great suffering and pure aesthetic pleasure'.
Shakinovsky and Gavronsky work together and separately, but their artistic practice is symbiotic – the work, whether solo or collaborative, comes out of individual responses to the same stimuli, individual answers to the same questions. Often emerging from a pictorial dialogue, the content – or the question – dictates the shape and medium of the work, which ranges from unapologetically humble ready-made images to site specific installations. The ambivalent authorship of the works resulting from this dialogue – and their conversation, in turn, with the canon of art history – acts as a challenge to the notion of uniqueness and identifiable style as a signifier of artistic integrity.
Children feature prominently in many of Gavronsky’s paintings and drawings, acting alternately as a pair of naive and truthful eyes for the viewer to look through, and a source of mischief and daring, unhappy with the status quo and prepared to attempt the impossible. In Shakinovsky’s small abstract oils fashioned out of cut and bent canvas and paper, and other mixed media works, she is interested in shifting the viewer’s perspective – whether it be visually or conceptually – to notice or think something not thought a moment before. She often uses found quotidian objects and ready-made images, stripped of their original context and placed in unexpected relationships and combinations.
11 February 2014 - 15 March 2014
