Current Review(s)
'This is your world in which we grow, and we will grow to hate you'
Michael MacGarry at STEVENSON in JohannesburgMichael MacGarry’s latest offering, which opened on 18 February 2010 at the Brodie/Stevenson gallery, is aesthetically rich and conceptually dense. The exhibition develops MacGarry’s ongoing preoccupation with the ramifications of imperialism on the African continent. For this exhibition, 'This is the world in which we grow and we will learn to hate you', he draws particular attention to the 'newfound and existing exploitation of hydrocarbons… [as] an extension of the colonial-era legacy of mercantile capitalism'.
18 February 2010 - 20 March 2010
The Worship of Worthless Things
Michael MacGarry at STEVENSON in Cape TownGaudiumus igatuer (Latin for ‘let us therefore rejoice’), the name of one of Michael MacGarry’s sculptures in his latest exhibition, is perhaps the key conceit underpinning the show itself. However, this is not to say that ‘The Other Half: Past, Future and Now’, on at Stevenson Cape Town, is a happy celebration: far from it. It is far more concerned, in a sense, with the rest of the old academic commercium song. For although the song is widely known by its first line it is in fact called De Brevitate Vitae or On the Shortness of Life.
The commercium is, itself, a playful collection of jocular platitudes concerning the inevitable loss of youth and expresses a not-too-serious hope that the student’s academy will live forever. Ostensibly a young man’s drinking song, it, like much of MacGarry’s work, contains a flippancy that dismisses the gnomic seriousness that most academies demand, while at the same time paying a kind of homage to it.
MacGarry has always steered close to the shores of art history’s academy, noting and referencing those significant twentieth century outcrops of Dada and its derivatives – in particular ‘assemblage’ and ‘conceptualism’. And like so much of what underpinned those movements, MacGarry displays a certain ambivalence towards the art object itself - both confirming and denying its centrality. However, here in ‘The Other Half’, MacGarry seems to have gone a step further as he rather surprisingly turns his attention to a theme that seems to be marking out his generation.
24 May 2012 - 07 July 2012
Listings(s)
'This is your world in which we grow, and we will grow to hate you'
Michael MacGarry at STEVENSON in JohannesburgIn Michael MacGarry's second solo exhibition at Brodie/Stevenson, this Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner looks at the exploitation of Africa's natural resources, particularly the extraction and exportation of crude oil.
18 February 2010 - 20 March 2010
'Ampersand' - A Dialogue of Contemporary Art from South Africa and the Daimler Art Collection
Athi Patra-Ruga, Dineo Bopape, Lerato Shadi, Willem Boshoff, Zander Blom and Michael MacGarry at Daimler ContemporaryIn the year of the Soccer World Cup in our country, the Daimler Art Collection aims to continue its lengthy history of addressing and promoting South Africa’s cultural development with an international contemporary art exhibition in Berlin. This presentation is arranged in dialogue form, juxtaposing current performative, conceptual and abstract tendencies in contemporary South African art with selected works from the Daimler Art Collection. At this event in Berlin, the Daimler Art Collection (which concentrates on abstract, avant-garde movements and reduced conceptual tendencies from Bauhaus to current contemporary art) presents mainly new acquisitions in the field of international contemporary art for the first time.
The presentation of the ‘Ampersand’ exhibition includes site-specific installations and video art as well as paintings, drawings and photography. About 60 works are shown. While the
exhibition does feature selected predecessors, its main thrust is directed at current works from recent years by younger artists (most of whom are between 30 and 40 years old). Works by fourteen international artists from the Daimler Art Collection are shown in a dialogue with sixteen South African artists.
Artists on show include Zander Blom, Dineo Bopape, Willem Boshoff, Kay Hassan, Nicholas Hlobo, Abrie Fourie, Lawrence Lemaoana, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Athi-Patra Ruga, Lerato Shadie, Rowan Smith, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Mikhael Subotzky, Sue Williamson and James Webb.
10 June 2010 - 10 October 2010
