Stephen Hobbs

Current Review(s)

'End of Cities'

Stephen Hobbs at blank projects

Stephen Hobbs’ latest offering at Blank Projects is the final exhibition in a series of initiatives over the last three years centering on the cities of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. In ‘End of Cities’, Hobbs draws on a body of photographic research in which he has documented, over time, numerous features of the urban landscape, including buildings, construction sites and various other kinds of urban debris. This forms the basis for a series of new works, focusing on Cape Town’s two infamously incomplete highway bridges as the central motif, and playing off blank projects’ new, not yet fully renovated space in downtown Woodstock.

Not surprisingly then, the exhibition, comprised of a number of photographs and photo-collages, sculptures and a sound installation of noises from beneath the bridges, has a decidedly unfinished feel to it. This is intentional: Hobbs takes on the transitional and incomplete as both subject matter and aesthetic in this body of work, giving many of the pieces a distinctly propositional status rather than aiming for a sense of completion.

05 November 2009 - 27 November 2009

Listings(s)

'End of Cities'

Stephen Hobbs at blank projects

'End of Cities' is the final exhibition in a three year project which focussed on Johannesburg, Durban and now Cape Town. Stephen Hobbs works out his obsessions with urban life and the way that cities function - or fail to function - through photography and sculpture.

05 November 2009 - 27 November 2009

'Fool's Gold'

Stephen Hobbs at David Krut Projects

'Fool's Gold', Stephen Hobbs’ debut solo exhibition at David Krut Projects, explores the spaces between buildings in Johannesburg as a zone where 'special even remarkable findings set up a relationship between buildings as sculpture and "public" space as treasure trove'.

12 August 2010 - 25 September 2010

'Activities on the Grid'

Stephen Hobbs at University of Stellenbosch Art Gallery

Stephen Hobbs’ creative enquiry has been informed by various political and social conditions shaping his multi-functional and responsive urban practice since 1994. ‘The City’, Johannesburg in particular, has served as a tool and a laboratory for making sense of South Africa in a state of development and growth after apartheid. In Johannesburg’s case, this process of development has often been seen as the opposite: a radical regression.
 
For two decades, Hobbs has worked with this contradiction as a vehicle for understanding urban change and the function of decay as a metaphorical language; for his interest in the relationship between people and the environments that they build.
 
In recent years, Hobbs’ preference for the field of architecture as a space for collaboration, has informed a range of sculptural propositions reflecting on issues of scale and visionary thinking in the built environment. The often pathetic inevitability of the unbuildable serves as a framework within which Hobbs conducts particular research in ‘developing’ countries, where modern experiments failed in the face of local order, economics and context specific practices.
 
Activities on the Grid is a survey exhibition, spanning video, photography and installation, including select works from Hobbs’ final year at the Wits School of Fine Art, demonstrating his interest in abstract, ephemeral situations and readings of urban space.

01 March 2013 - 27 April 2013

'MATRIX'

Maja Maljevic, Mary Wafer, Diane Victor, Senzo Shabangu, Deborah Bell, Stephen Hobbs and William Kentridge at David Krut Projects

David Krut Projects Cape Town is pleased to present 'MATRIX', an exhibition of editioned works from the David Krut Print Workshop (DKW) that sheds light on the processes of printmaking. The selection of works present a range of different intaglio and relief printing techniques and are exhibited alongside the plates that were used to make them and, in some cases, the trial proofs that show the development of the work.

Prints, unlike paintings or drawings, generally exist in multiple examples.  They are created by drawing a composition not directly on paper but on another surface, called a matrix, and then, by various techniques, printing that image on paper. The matrix (from the Latin word mater, meaning mother) can be made out of a number of things – a woodblock, a metal plate, a lithographic stone or a mesh screen for example. At DKW, etching (on copper plates) and relief printing (on woodblock and linoleum plates) are used most frequently. Artists in studio have the opportunity to work with a master printer, who helps to achieve the marks the artists want by guiding the artists in the manipulation of the matrix. The job of the collaborating printer, ultimately, is to build the confidence in artists that allows the way they see the world to come through their hands, even in a medium using techniques they may be unfamiliar with and taking the transformative nature of the press into account. Printmaking is the only medium in which the process of artists’ image creation is revealed, also to themselves – when a proof is pulled off the press, the artist is also seeing the result for the first time, along with everyone else. Consequently, the print workshop is a supportive environment that embraces technical and aesthetic exploration, innovation and collaboration.

 

Included in 'MATRIX' are works by Deborah Bell, Stephen Hobbs, William Kentridge, Maja Maljevic, Senzo Shabangu, Diane Victor and Mary Wafer that offer viewers insight into techniques from linocut to aquatint. As well as plates and proofs, the installation includes explanatory text for each technique used.

25 January 2014 - 09 March 2014

'Temporary but Permanent: Projects' (Postponed)

Marcus Neustetter and Stephen Hobbs at MOAD Museum of African Design

MOAD is proud to present Hobbs/Neustetter’s new multi screen video installation based on their performance piece for the 'Across The Board – Public Space / Public Sphere' – Tate Modern programme for the Sud Triennial, Douala, Cameroon, in December 2013.

In addition the basement gallery will showcase a range of works reflecting on their concerns with public and building environment conditions.

For more information information on the opening, click here, and find more information on the website.

Exhibition Opening Postponed

29 October 2014 - 14 December 2014

'Jag Snag'

Stephen Hobbs at Johannesburg Art Gallery

Following 3 years of research and discussion, with Chief Curator, Antoinette Murdoch, into the historical and physical properties of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Stephen Hobbs will present a series of small, medium and large scale architectonic responses to the Meyer/ Pienaar Gallery - extension. 

Given that this part of the Johannesburg Art Gallery has been closed until major renovationstake place, Stephen Hobbs’s intervention into the building will evolve over a 4-month period, with a series of project milestones advertised at various points, to highlight the research and nature of the work. 

Through a combination of collapsed exhibition screens, structural props and special lighting; the installation will suggest alternative spatial design possibilities for the gallery. 

Additional exhibits about the 100 year life of the gallery, its various heritage attributes, important art historical references and so on, will engage existing and new audiences with the significance of the building and the role it has played in promoting art and culture in the city. 

The Jag Snag project originates from Antoinette Murdoch’s sustained efforts to improve the gallery’s built condition as the original Lutyens building reaches its centenary in 2015.

For exhibition information please contact Tiny Malefane at tinym@joburg.org.za

King George St, between Woolmarans & Noort St, Joubert Park, Johannesburg

T: +27 (011) 725 3130/ 3152. Secure parking is available

16 March 2014 - 27 July 2014